


Cadaver Gala

by Dani Dandelion (rat_insatiable)



Category: Corpse Party (Video Game), Invader Zim
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-19 12:53:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 24,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2388908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rat_insatiable/pseuds/Dani%20Dandelion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dib finds Naho's blog, and soon, a celebration of stiffs. Spoilers for Corpse Party PSP.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1-1: It Continues

Dib sprinted through the middle school halls with Gaz in hot, shin-kicking pursuit.

"Two hundred and fifty-nine hours!" she yelled behind him.

Dib risked a look over his shoulder. His sister's glare was too close, and his loaded backpack was slowing him down.

"I said it wasn't me!" Dib nearly overbalanced turning the corner into another hall. "Can't you just drop it?!"

Gaz put on a burst of speed. "Two _hundred_ and _fifty-nine hours_ , Dib! A hundred-plus percent item collection, time attack achievements, max upgrades. All wasted, because of _you!_ "

Running from Gaz between classes all day was tiring. Dib held a tenuous hope that his sister's rage would peter out by lunch, but she was like a purple-and-black hate conduit with a direct connection to hell.

The cafeteria entrance came into sight. Dib rushed for the double doors, reached out to shove them open, and Gaz smashed him through with a flying kick to his spine.

Dib sailed through the air and smacked into the cafeteria floor, skidding a few feet. He rolled over and sat up as the doors swung closed behind a quickly advancing Gaz.

Dib scooted backwards until his backpack hit a lunch table. "I didn't do anything, I swear!"

Gaz thundered up in her glossy black goth boots, reared one of them back, and kicked Dib in the shin. He yelped and fell over, clutching his much-abused leg. Shin guards were starting to sound like a good investment.

Gritting his teeth, Dib dragged himself up to sit at the lunch table. Gaz thumped into her seat a few feet down the bench, and set out her lunch with increasingly aggressive movements.

Dib gave his sister a sidelong glance. "Look, I'm sorry about whatever happened to your game. But I'm gonna be busy for the next couple days, so you'll have to find someone else to kick around while I'm gone."

Gaz released her unopened pudding cup before clenching her fists. "Busy?" She rounded on Dib. "What stupid paranormal excuse is it this time? Because if you think it'll help you escape my wrath..."

"Oh, I'm just..." Sweat broke out on the back of Dib's neck. "Going to a haunted school in another dimension." He grinned in a way he hoped looked winning, and not terrified for his life.

Seconds passed. Dib's face started to hurt. "Wait, you mean the death school you were talking about last night?"

He relaxed somewhat. "Yeah, the one where a bunch of murders took place before it closed down. Something to do with a girl named Sachiko. The actual building was destroyed and had another school built on top of it, but it still exists in some ghostly alternate reality."

"So how're you planning to get there?" Gaz leaned back to eye Dib's bulging backpack. "Did you take Dad's experimental transporter to school again?"

"Nah. I don't think it'd work for this, anyway." Dib hauled his backpack onto the table. "Most of what's in here's food, water, and recording equipment." He unzipped a side pocket and took out a slightly warped, person-shaped piece of paper. "To get there, I'm gonna use the 'Sachiko Ever After' charm I found on the internet. It needs at least two people to work, and I know _exactly_ who's gonna help me."

He zipped up his backpack, slinging it over one shoulder as he stood up from the table with the paper doll in one hand.

"I'll go."

Dib looked sideways to find Gaz standing with him. "Huh?"

"I'll go to the death school with you."

"But—"

"I'm going with you," Gaz said, knuckles cracking as her hands trembled into fists. "And if you're lying about it being in an alternate nightmare-reality, I will kick your ass _so_ hard, you'll be puking buckles for a week."

"Okay, okay!" Dib held up his hands, eyes darting to Gaz's steel-toed boots. "I never said it was a nightmare-reality, but okay! You can come."

Gaz crossed her arms. "Good."

Dib sighed, adjusted his backpack, and started for a familiar corner of the cafeteria.

-

Zim tapped his fingers on the table. He glanced at the narrow windows in the double doors, through the larger ones facing the middle school's front lawn, and down at the vent in the wall behind him.

He faced forward again with a huff; still no sign of GIR. He'd called him before first period to deliver something, and should've received it hours ago. If lunch ended without that item in Zim's hands, then there would have been no point in—

"Hey, Zim!"

Zim jerked his head up. "What is it now, you filthy _Dib!_ Can't you see I'm incredibly busy plotting the downfall of your entire race?"

"Yeah sure. Look, I'm gonna go research a haunted school in another dimension." Dib held up a white paper doll. "And you can't come."

"Good for you." Zim flapped a hand dismissively. "Have fun annoying all the dead humans."

"Okay!" Dib chirped with a wide grin. "Enjoy your uninterrupted diabolical masterminding."

Zim glared as Dib sidestepped away from the table, returning to his sister waiting ten feet away. He spoke a few words to Gaz that Zim didn't catch, and she nodded. Zim's fingers flexed against the edge of the table as Dib babbled on about something. It was too low to make out the words, but loud enough to hear his excitement.

Zim scored four little lines in the tabletop and leaned forward, straining to listen. Dib looked over his shoulder, still grinning, and fluttered the piece of paper in Zim's direction.

Zim slammed his hands on the table and shoved himself to his feet. " _Not_ so fast, stink-worm!" He marched over, fists rigid at his sides. "Think you can just stand there and make plans to defeat me _right in front of my face?!_ " He jabbed a finger up at Dib as he rattled off the end of his sentence in triple-time.

Dib backed out of chin-poking range and said, "Then maybe you _should_ come along, and make sure I don't make plans to do stuff to you." He shifted his gaze to one side. "Or else you'll never know."

"Enough talk! I'll show you what a load of _horse dookie_ your ghost school is." Zim swiped for the paper doll, but Dib backed up with it held out of reach.

"Challenge accepted, space-boy. But we gotta do this right, so listen." Dib held the paper doll in both hands. "To get to the haunted school, we have to perform a ritual. It goes like this..."

The level of noise in the cafeteria rose as students finished their meals. Lunch trays slammed over trash bins, and clattered into metal tubs to await their weekly scrubbing. Some kids filtered into the halls to chat by their lockers, while others hung back with their cliques at the lunch tables.

"That's the most insipid thing I've ever heard," Zim said at the end of Dib's rambling explanation.

"But that's what the blog post said!" Dib insisted. "I mean, it was Google-translated, but still!"

"Ha! Your primitive machine translation probably got it wrong. I've used it, and it can't even detect Vortian."

"Can we just get on with it?" Gaz cut in. "Before I start considering the whole _revenge_ thing again."

"All right, jeez!" Dib held out the paper doll, grasping a tiny arm by thumb and forefinger. "Grab on to part of it, and repeat that phrase I mentioned in your head three times." He glanced at Zim, then Gaz. "Once for each of us."

Gaz grunted, and grabbed the doll's head. Zim fixed Dib with a squinty-eyed glare, and took hold of the doll's other arm.

One of the double doors squeaked open as Zita returned from her locker, arms loaded with magazines full of cute boys. Something small slipped in behind her before the door closed.

Dib looked up. "Did everyone finish?"

"Yes, yes. You kept me waiting," said Zim.

Dib's eyes went back to the doll. "Now we pull it apart, so we each have our own piece. And... go!"

The paper ripped into three separate sections—Dib got an arm, Gaz got the head, and Zim got the rest.

Zim grinned at his papery most-of-a-torso and held it up high. " _Victory!_ "

"That's not the point, Zim." Dib examined his bent paper arm. "The blog didn't explain exactly what the pieces were for. Just that we should hold onto them." He shrugged and pocketed the scrap. "Just something about Sachiko getting angry if the ritual fails."

Zim stared at his shred of paper, no longer impressed, and noticed two things at once. The first thing was GIR, using a greasy table as a slip-n-slide halfway across the cafeteria. The second thing was his antennae vibrating under his wig.

He mentally shoved aside the second thing and shouted, "GIR! Come here at once!" The crowd of kids cheering on the robot turned as one to look at Zim. He cleared his throat. "You... bad, bad doggy. Now heel!"

GIR stood at attention, the front of his dog suit glossy with pizza squeezings, and jumped over the crowd. As he landed and trotted for Zim with squeaky steps, the kids returned to aimless chatter.

Zim pressed a hand to his wig to still his twitchy antennae, just in time to hear an intensifying low rumble. The fluorescent lights creaked and flickered. Dib, Gaz, and Zim glanced up at the swaying fixtures as the floor moved back and forth under their feet.

Dib staggered into Zim's table for support. "An earthquake? But this place hasn't seem seismic activity since—" A swinging light buzzed dangerously above him, throwing his attention back to the ceiling.

Zim wrapped his arms and legs around the bench of his lunch table, and Gaz braced herself against the wall. The other children's voices rose in confusion, cries erupting from a few. GIR continued on his merry way, dancing along with the floor.

The buzzing light fell and shattered on the table between Zim and Dib. Zim shrieked and ducked his head as Dib threw himself away from it, sprawling on the floor.

The power blinked out among sounds of breaking glass and creaking tables, plunging the room into darkness. The other students went silent; only GIR's squeaky footsteps remained.

Zim stared straight ahead at the corner near his usual seating position, and his jaw dropped. The hole in the wall, which hadn't existed a second ago, had gotten bigger.

Gaz saw the opening, and edged away from it along the moving wall. The hole shattered across the floor in three quick flashes to open under her feet, and she plummeted.

"Gaz!" Dib threw himself onto the lunch table as the hole appeared halfway underneath it.

Zim kept his limbs locked around the bench and yelled over the screams coming from the other students. "You wretched fool, what did you _do?!_ "

"How should I know?!" The table lurched into the hole, leaving Dib clinging to the edge by his fingertips. "I was just interpreting the grammatically incorrect instructions!" The ongoing quake loosened Dib's fingers, and he fell in, wailing all the way down.

Zim scrambled further up the bench as it tilted, and peered over the top of the table. GIR was only a few feet away, arms windmilling as he squealed in the chaos.

"GIR! _Help me!_ " Zim went from angled to vertical as the table capsized.

"That mah master!" GIR crowed, activating his leg-rockets and blasting towards Zim.

Zim grabbed the table's edge and jumped, arms outstretched. The robot's bulging dog-suit eyes whirled as he spiraled closer.

GIR barreled past Zim's grasping hands, into his stomach, and down the hole.

A sound like lightning exploding a tree drowned out GIR's screeching laughter.

***

Dib opened his eyes to darkness. Grit shifted under the side of his face as he turned his head away from the week-old roadkill smell, only to find more of the same. Sitting up, he rubbed dirt off his cheek and groped in front of him with one hand. He hissed in air and flinched back when his fingers met something wooden and covered in scratches not a foot from his face.

Something scuffed on the floor behind him, and he turned. His sight was adjusting to the gloom, and his sister stood several feet away, looking out the window of a beat-up sliding door.

Dib performed a quick scan of his surroundings: blackboard, age-stained walls, scattered desks and chairs, holes in the floor. The scratched wooden thing in front of him was a lectern. Rain pounded against pitch-black windows along one side of the room.

"I think it worked, Gaz." Dib stood and dusted himself off. "We made it in."

"What tipped you off?" Gaz faced a ragged notice pinned to the wall by the blackboard. "No electricity, everything falling apart, or the murder messages everywhere?"

Dib shifted his supply-laden backpack more securely onto his shoulders, and approached Gaz across the creaking floorboards. "What murder messages?"

Gaz looked around the room, lingering on the blackboard for a second, then pointed to the tacked-up notice. Dib stepped up to read it.

_Heavenly Host Elementary - Notice to All Faculty and Students..._

A warning to stay on high alert due to recent kidnappings followed, signed by Principal Takamine Yanagihori. Dib read the name over a few times to commit it to memory.

"This is supposed to be a Japanese school, right?" Gaz pointed at the one-paragraph memo. "So why is this in English?"

Dib's eyes flicked up from Yanagihori's name. Something had skittered across the words, but he couldn't find the insect responsible. The letters were uneven, as if done on a typewriter. They slid out of their spots when he wasn't looking directly at them.

Dib blinked a few times and faced his sister. "Maybe this was English class?"

"In first grade?" Gaz looked up. Dib followed her gaze to the faded metal placard above the sliding door: 1-A.

Dib headed to one of the wooden desks and set his backpack on it. "Oh yeah, have you seen Zim anywhere?" He unzipped the main pocket and pulled out a camcorder. "I'd like to tape the look on his face when he realizes I was right."

"It was just us here when I woke up. He probably got away." Gaz came to stand by the desk, arms crossed.

"Not if he did the charm with us." Dib turned the camcorder on, and adjusted the light settings. "We'll find him sooner or later. Anyway!" He aimed at the blackboard and hit record. "Agent Mothman here, recording from inside Heavenly Host Elementary School. And proving it's not just creepypasta." As he spoke, he did a slow sweeping shot across the front of the room. "Using a ritual I found on a Japanese paranormal expert's blog, I convinced the alien specimen I've been studying for the past two years to come here with me. I also brought my sister. Say hi to the Swollen Eyeball Network, Gaz." He swish-panned to Gaz, who sneered and turned away.

Dib weaved around misplaced chairs and debris, stepping deeper into the classroom. "The alien's whereabouts are currently unknown, but he has to be somewhere in this school. Even if he doesn't show up right away, I'll be making visual and written records of any paranormal activity I can—"

"Woah, a dead body."

"Gaz, please. I'm trying to—" A beat, then Dib lowered the camcorder and turned to his sister. "C'mon, don't tell me there's really _wow!_ " He whipped the camcorder back up to film his hasty approach. "A dead body!"

"Duh." Gaz looked down at a crumpled corpse wedged in the space between two desks. Its dusty blue uniform was torn in several places, revealing flesh rotted to scraps, with fabric sunken in where organs used to be. The roadkill smell from earlier hung over the remains.

Dib's throat tightened up. "I think that's a high school uniform." He swallowed and crouched next to the corpse. The skull had no recognizable facial features, and without a scalp, no hair remained. Dib held his breath as he tracked his eyes over the body. He was about to stand when a shiny plastic square clipped to the front of the uniform's blazer caught his attention.

He leaned in closer. It was a student ID in a plastic sleeve, stained with something dark. The stain covered where the picture would've been.

Dib pulled back and let out his breath. "I can't read whatever's on it."

Gaz crouched to inspect the ID, then stood. "It's in Japanese. Which makes sense, considering this is a Japanese school."

"But he couldn't have been a student here," Dib said, standing and checking the camcorder in his right hand. "He must've done the charm, and..." He glanced at the corpse through the camcorder's LCD screen, then turned to film the back of the room. "Let's try exploring the rest of this place. The doors still work, right?"

They picked their way across the floor, and Dib collapsed over a desk as the room jolted.

"What? Again?!" Dib clutched the camcorder to the desktop as sediment sifted onto him from above. He heard something clatter a couple desks behind, and looked over his shoulder.

Dib's backpack had fallen over from the shock, and spilled its contents into the gaping hole in the floor right next to the desk.

Dib howled, " _My supplies!_ I needed those!" His backpack slid into the hole as the quaking subsided. "That... not so much now, I guess." Dib straightened up, raked dirt out of his hair with one hand, and looked back at Gaz dusting off her black-striped hoodie sleeves. "Well, this sucks. At least we're still okay."

"Enjoy that."

Dib's insides froze. That wasn't Gaz, or anyone Dib had ever heard before. The space between the desks with the corpse was glowing blue.

Camcorder ready, Dib sidled up to find a flickering blue flame orb sitting stationary above the body.

"Score! A will o' wisp!" Dib's voice hit an excited pitch. "I thought I'd have to wait 'til I did my paranormal trip around the world after high school graduation to find one of these babies!"

Gaz stepped up next to Dib. "Well, this is awkward."

Dib didn't take his lens or eyes off the spirit. "Whaddya mean? This is awesome!"

"Weren't we just staring at this guy's dead body a minute ago?" Gaz pointed at the spirit, which wavered. "When _he_ was probably watchin' us before we woke up."

Dib gave his sister a sidelong glance, then focused on the spirit. "You were talking to us, right? What did you mean? Are you implying something bad's gonna happen? Like whatever happened to you?"

Gaz shoved her hands into her hoodie pocket and took one long step back.

"I've been listening since you got here," the spirit said. "You're one of those gung-ho investigative types." It sighed without air. "It's too bad. You guys look like you're only middle-schoolers."

"How does this place exist in another dimension?" Dib said. "It was demolished and paved over decades ago. They even put another school on top of it."

"It was. But the negative energy gathered from years of child murders allows this place to exist separately from the rest of reality." Blue fire swirled in the wisp's white center. "A third person came with you, right? They were probably sent to another closed space."

Dib lowered the camera an inch to face the spirit directly. "What, like he's in a different room?"

"More like a different plane of existence. He could be standing in the same room as you right now, but you'd never see or hear each other."

"Well that's inconvenient." Dib thought for a second. "So, care to tell us how you died? In case it was a trap, or something."

The wisp was still. It had no eyes, but Dib felt its stare.

"You've already been trapped," the spirit said. "Or didn't you know? You didn't, did you?"

Dib glanced at the pitch-black windows and shuffled back from the body a little.

"Another thing." The spirit's flame swayed like a torch seeking oxygen. "After you die, you're stuck here, feeling the pain of your death forever."

The disembodied voice laughed right in Dib's ear. He scrambled away, caught his heel on a loose floorboard, and fell backward. The camcorder sailed out of his hands, arcing over his head and into a hole.

Dib thumped the back of his head against the floor. "Oh, come _on!_ "

The laughter burrowing in his ears changed to sobs. Dib stumbled to his feet and bolted for the door. Gaz, way ahead of him, rattled it open, and they rushed into the hall.

The crying stopped the instant Gaz slid the door to 1-A shut. Dib leaned over with his hands on his knees and took deep breaths.

"Well isn't this just freakin' great." Dib straightened and brushed his hair spike back. "All my survival stuff is gone, and now almost everything I came here to do is ruined!"

Dib frowned at the corridor. It was unlit, and large, darkened doorways loomed at either end. The space between them was riddled with holes, broken glass, and rotted-out beams from the ceiling.

"It's not like I can't still investigate." Dib turned right and started walking. "Maybe I can find out how to get to those other closed spaces."

"What if that guy died in a really stupid way?"

Dib looked over his shoulder. Gaz followed behind, hands stuffed into her hoodie pocket, her hair throwing extra shadows over her face.

"What if he starved to death?" Gaz said. "Or died of thirst?"

Dib scoffed. "We're not gonna be here that long, Gaz. Depending on when we find Zim, we'll probably get back in time for Mysterious Mysteries. Knowing him, though, he'll probably leave without us."

Silence took over as they walked. Besides their footsteps, only creaky spots and the occasional scrap of wood kicked out of the way made any noise at all.

They reached one of the large doorways. "Stairs? I thought we were already on the first floor." Dib made his way down, avoiding a small puddle of candle wax on the landing.

Dib and Gaz reached the next floor, and were hit with the sight and smell of another corpse. It sat slumped against the wall below blackened windows, ten feet in front of them.

"Oh man, is that—" Dib put a hand over his mouth and nose, taking a step closer. "This one's _fresh!_ The blood's not even dry!"

The unlucky girl, about their size, stared through them at an angle. Her head was a lopsided mush. Dib backed up to stand beside his sister.

"Probably another Japanese kid," Gaz said. "Bet they all found that charm on the internet, too."

"It _was_ on a Japanese blog." Dib looked at the body, away from the staring eyes. Unlike the corpse in 1-A, the cause of death was clear. "What's going on here? Does this school _eat children?_ "

Dib peered into the corridor ahead. It split off in three directions, one shortly leading to another large doorway.

"That must be the entrance," Dib said. "Let's see if we can get outside."

"Wouldn't that be too easy?"

Dib halted in mid-step—not to answer Gaz's question, but because another blue glow caught his eye. The spirit, fully formed in the shape of a little boy in bloody clothes, sat just inside the entryway, his back pressed against the door frame.

"Jeez, an even better one!" Dib whispered, hands aching for electronics. "And me without a camera!"

Gaz's footsteps stopped a few paces behind. The ghost in the doorway stared straight ahead at the other side of the frame, dull eyes unblinking, arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees. The little boy's mouth worked, lip-syncing something unheard.

"I bet _he_ knows more than that loser wisp upstairs," said Dib, and he stepped toward the ghost.

Gaz's hand clamped Dib's shoulder like a vise, and she yanked him back so hard he almost stumbled into her. He recovered his balance and twisted out of her grip to face her.

Gaz's narrowed brown eyes met his. Dib's glare and reproachful words vanished as Gaz slowly shook her head.

She planted a hand between Dib's shoulders, and shoved him in the opposite direction. He allowed himself to be herded away from the entrance without a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Silly Dib, mistaking hitodama for will-o'-wisps. He was just excited, that's all.


	2. 1-2: The Nightmare of the School Years

Something crunched like tires on sandy asphalt. Zim sat up to find GIR rolling across a gritty wooden floor.

Zim stood and brushed off his uniform with a sneer. "GIR, status report. Where has that little fool-boy taken us?"

GIR snapped upright, a stubby black paw cocked in salute. "Sir! We are in another school. Big-headed child is not present."

"He left me to rot? _Again?_ " Zim clenched his fists and snarled at the foul-smelling air. "That _worthless_ monkey! When I find him, I'll..." He stomped around, glaring at unfamiliar desks and furniture. "This isn't like the other Earth schools I've seen. It's even more wretched than the first one I infiltrated."

He approached the lectern, while GIR played hopscotch around the debris. Zim ran a gloved hand over a pattern of scratches carved into the side.

 _Mari, I'm with Yuuichi. Come meet us here._ Another section of scratches continued below. _Mari, if you're reading this, I've gone to look for you. Yuuichi's staying behind in case you show up. If I don't find you outside, then I'll come back here in an hour._

Reddish-brown stains almost obscured the message crammed into the bottom-left corner near the floor.

_door won't open_

The final markings appeared to be scraped in with fingernails. Zim pulled his hand away and turned to the door.

Something thumped against the wall behind him. He spun back around—GIR was jostling a heavy cabinet, trying to squirm through an opening on the other side.

"GIR!" Zim walked over and pulled his robot away by the scruff of his dog costume. "What do you think you're doing?"

GIR struggled. "But it smells nice in there!"

The scent of decaying flesh grew stronger when Zim tried looking through the opening behind the cabinet.

"We're leaving," Zim said, backing up from the cabinet and setting GIR beside him. "Whether we find Dib on the way is _his_ problem. But maybe I can find something useful in here first."

He peered up at the cabinet as he finished speaking. Greasy hanks of black hair filled every inch of space behind the glass.

Zim tore his gaze away and yanked GIR along behind him towards the door. He shoved it open with a rattle that echoed down the dark hallway.

The entire building was in severe disrepair. The boards creaked at every step, and sections of the floor were spongy with mold and rot. GIR windmilled his arms and squealed; the stench from behind the cabinet was much stronger outside.

"What _happened_ here?" Zim headed up the hall from the classroom, crushed glass crinkling under his boots. "It smells like every last human crawled into the walls and died."

A large doorway loomed ahead, with stairs beyond it. He started for them, and came up short a few steps later at a tug on his shirt.

"What now, GIR? We're wasting time!"

GIR pointed to their right. "I found a friend."

A human teenager sat slumped against the wall five feet away, the front of their shirt dark with blood. Zim's eyes followed a thick red streak from the neck stump to the floor, where the head laid on its side, open-mouthed and crawling with maggots.

Zim backed up. His heels hit something that clattered, and he whipped around to find himself standing in the bones of a skeleton in greyed-out rags. He squeaked and jumped clear of them.

"Frieeend," GIR droned, toddling toward the headless corpse with an open-mouthed grin. Zim rushed forward and collared his robot, then dragged him toward the stairs. "But he's lonely!"

"He's dead, GIR. Like the rest of this school."

The stairs were blocked at the top by a pile of desks and chairs from floor to ceiling, so Zim retraced his steps. He walked briskly past the two corpses, locking his gaze straight ahead, and took the south stairwell down.

A row of windows greeted him as he stepped out of the stairwell into the next floor. He came up and placed his hands against the cold glass. Rain pelted unseen on the other side. Unable to find a latch, he banged a fist against the glass. The panes didn't even rattle.

Zim stepped back and cast about for something large to throw. The only loose objects around were splintered planks, broken glass, and a crumpled body halfway in a hole. He considered lasers, and decided against it in the next thought. The windows showed only a black abyss.

Zim tensed at a distinct lack of background nonsense. He glanced in every direction, expecting to find GIR swimming in a pile of—

"Dear, I think our relationship is splintering." GIR bobbed a small piece of wood in one paw, then waved around another. "I know! You're really graining on my nerves!" He ate them both and fell back in shrieking giggles.

Zim facepalmed and yanked GIR to his feet. "Quit fooling around! You have enough trash to eat at home."

They continued down the hall, Zim pulling GIR away from the body slumped partially into the hole. Its face was a mess of finger-width gouges. Zim was about to pick up the pace when he saw a piece of notebook paper weighed down by one of the corpse's arms. He crouched down and gingerly tugged it free.

The paper held a message with no regard for lines or margins. _I'm sorry. I didn't know it was you, I was just so hungry. By the time I recognized who it was, I'd already eaten most of your arm. You were dead before I got there, but does that really make it better?_

Zim held the paper at arm's length and let it drift to the floor. He walked past the corpse, shaking out his hands.

"Master, look!" GIR ran ahead and pointed at another tall doorway. "Shoes!"

Zim caught up, and found the room full of child-sized shoes his robot had indicated. Pairs and singles occupied cubby holes, with the rest scattered on the floor. GIR frolicked full-tilt between the two middle shelves, directing Zim's attention to the sliding wooden doors beyond.

"Could it be?" Zim hurried past the shelves, dodging around the shoe pile GIR was constructing. He reached up to the fogged glass, and tiny vibrations went through his fingers from the rain outside.

Zim's face split in a toothy grin. "It's the way out! I did it, GIR!" He latched both hands onto the side of the door. "We're _free!_ "

He pulled the sliding door open with a flourish. It didn't happen. He pulled again. The door was one with the wall. He yanked harder, his fingers slipped, and he scrabbled at the edge.

Zim stopped and backed away from the door, shaking his head. "No. This is just a minor setback." He'd felt the chill from outside through the panes, and the light condensation. "There must be hundreds of doors and windows around here. They can't all be fake."

Standing on tiptoe, he rubbed at the glass to look through—blackness. He turned away and tapped his chin. Dib had mentioned the school was in another dimension. What if outdoors was nothing more than a formless rift? What if he made it outside, only to fall forever?

Zim stalked past the shoe cubbies, snatching GIR out of the shoe pile the little robot was playing in like autumn leaves. "If I ever find that filth again, I will _beat_ the way out of him."

-

Zim found more useless doors and windows in his investigation of the first floor. Not a single pane so much as rattled when he knocked on it. His suspicion of a sucking void on the other side was all that kept him from deploying his Pak legs in laser formation.

He reached a long hallway where the floor had rotted completely through. A narrow beam, bowed in the middle, cut across the pit, barely clearing the edges on either side.

GIR had been on point since they left the school entrance, making it easier for Zim to wrangle his robot before he could poke any newly discovered corpses. Upon sighting the bridge, GIR bounced straight for it.

Zim sidestepped onto the beam. He gasped and stood stock-still as his robot rocked the makeshift bridge with every step. "GIR, stop! It's going to—"

GIR obeyed and quit moving in mid-bounce, right above the center of the bridge. He dropped onto it, snapping the beam like a pencil.

Zim's Pak legs shot for an exposed ceiling beam in mechanical reflex, while GIR dropped with the broken bridge. Decayed wood brushed the back of Zim's head as his metal limbs secured him high above the pit.

"GIR!" His voice echoed in the space between floors. The remains of the bridge had vanished. "Where are you?!"

A little green puppy face emerged from the rippling blackness at the bottom of the pit. "Come get dunked with me, Master!"

Zim braced himself with his lower Pak legs as he switched out the ones in the top port for a metal tentacle. He grasped the beam with the end of the tentacle, retracted the remaining legs, and lowered himself into the pit.

The blackness in the pit moved strangely around GIR as Zim descended. As the robot paddled his paws in it like a kiddy pool, the surface undulated not entirely like liquid should.

Zim got close enough to see the countless black beads glimmering on the water's surface. The beads swarmed up GIR's face and over his disguise's bulging eyes.

"Oooh!" GIR squealed, cyan optics shining through as hundreds of insects feasted on the dog costume's face. "It tickles!"

Zim jolted to a stop two feet above the insect pool. Centipedes and worms writhed in the mess. He shuddered, and reached down. "Get out of there, _now!_ "

The rest of the puppy-head fell away as insects decimated the front, revealing GIR's disappointed expression. "Awww," he said, raising an exposed metal arm, bugs falling away from the remaining fabric scraps.

Zim grasped GIR's tiny hand. Bugs instantly ran up Zim's arm, and he retracted on his Pak tentacle, screaming. He shot up through the hole, shattered the ceiling beam, and tumbled with GIR to the floor on the other side of the pit. Zim sprang up and ran in tight circles, shaking his arms to fling off maggots, beetles—he didn't know what else. A few pinged off GIR's exposed chrome, making the robot giggle.

He breathed hard and scrubbed at his arms. His skin still crawled. "Take that off, GIR. It's completely unsalvageable."

GIR unzipped his costume, now a hole-riddled, worm-infested bug trap, and stepped out of it. Zim lifted it with the end of a Pak leg, rounded the corner into a nearby hall, and flung the disguise into the darkness.

Zim turned back around, and stared at an empty wall. A roach skittered away from where GIR was standing two seconds ago.

He glanced at the pit and cringed—no, he would've heard that. That left the hallway ahead as the only other choice.

Only Zim's footsteps remained. He peered through a row of windows as he walked past—still black. He didn't bother testing them. Without GIR, he'd be leaving his back exposed.

The air pressed against him, humid with decay. He froze at a loud creak as his guts tried to jump up his throat—just the foundation settling.

"Ridiculous," he muttered, and brought out his radio communication device. "GIR, return to me immediately! And I don't mean after you're done playing." Static came through the device, followed by a childish giggle. " _Now,_ GIR!" The laughter continued, high-pitched, still not his robot's. Zim sighed in disgust and retracted the communicator into his Pak.

Now the giggling came from over his shoulder. Zim spun to face it, and it stopped. The hallway was empty.

The skin on the back of his head prickled, and he bit his lip. Every ounce of him said not to, but he had to turn back around.

A low error tone sounded somewhere in the back of his mind as he came face to face with a girl in a torn red dress.

Zim shrieked and backpedaled several feet. Then he looked again. The girl was small and willowy, with stringy black hair and ashen skin.

He stepped up to her. "Out of my way, dirt-child," he said with an imperious sweep of his arm. He stopped his advance and backed up a step; the girl smelled horrendous.

She stared back, glassy-eyed, hands behind her back. "You're not human, are you? I can tell."

Zim's eyes widened, then he scoffed. "Don't be silly. I'm a hideous little larva, just like you."

The girl blinked slowly, then grinned, presenting what was behind her back on one hand. Zim recoiled.

"I wonder how much he can take compared to people?" the little girl asked the skinless human head propped over her hand. It made meaty squishing sounds as she forced its jaw up and down. "'I bet he'll last a lot longer, Miss Sachiko! He'll scream more, and bleed more!'"

Zim clapped a hand over his mouth. The head didn't have a tongue.

"I'm gonna have _fun_ with you!" Sachiko giggled, then laughed, louder and louder.

Zim ran back to the beginning of the hall, with the pit on his right, and a wall in front of him. He whipped his gaze left, and found a red-paneled sliding door.

Sachiko's laughter struck from directly behind. Zim threw himself at the door, tore it open, and swung himself inside. He slammed it shut and pressed his back against the door.

Zim covered his mouth again and swallowed. The floor mats in the small room reeked of mold, compounding with the worst meat-rotting-in-summer smell he'd ever experienced.

But he couldn't give in to nausea; he wasn't safe yet. He scurried to the closet at the back of the room, curled his fingers into the handle, and pulled.

It slid open easily, dumping two bony corpses onto him. Their full stench didn't hit him until the bodies collided with his face.

Zim didn't bother shutting any doors as he fled the room screaming.

***

Gaz watched a judicious ten feet away as her brother chatted up a glowing red wisp.

"So how does the school continue to exist in another dimension, anyway, let alone multiple ones?" Dib stood inches from the dusty bones the spirit hovered over. "Does it run on souls? Is there some kinda soul engine somewhere?"

"Shut up," the spirit said, "or I'll make you shut up."

Gaz grumbled. Dib's incessant yammering was giving her a headache, or maybe it was the wisp. It hadn't spoken a fourth as much as Dib, though.

"That's probably what that shaking was earlier. I bet it's warming up for us." He held a hand to his chin, focusing on the floor. "Maybe if I could find it..."

The wisp slammed into Dib's chest with a pulse that ripped invisibly through the dead air. Gaz sidestepped, and Dib hit the floor right behind her.

"My bones pierced my organs when I died." The red wisp crackled. "I still feel it now, but even that's not as agonizing as listening to you talk!"

Dib coughed and staggered upright, wrapping an arm around his side. "Jeez, I was just curious!"

Gaz growled. "Forget it." She grabbed Dib's trench coat sleeve and pulled her brother down the hall.

Dib yanked his sleeve away, rubbing his ribs where the wisp had hit him. "It must be too angry about the whole 'dying in agony' thing to move on. It'd be nice if the ghosts around here weren't unhelpful jerks."

Gaz clenched her fists and rounded on Dib. "If you talk to any more ghosts, you're gonna get yourself killed. You almost walked right into that one kid! I bet if you'd looked in his eyes, he would've buried you alive, or something."

"I know what I'm doing, Gaz. I've been through this whole haunted house thing before like a million times. I do it practically every weekend."

"You did it every weekend," Gaz said, arms crossed, "until Zim showed up. Then you found someone to talk to who wasn't dead."

Dib rolled his eyes and strode past his sister. "Doesn't mean I stopped doing it entirely. It just became lower-priority."

Gaz shook her head at the floor, and went to catch up with her brother.

She stopped at a sickening crack of bones.

"Aw man, what the..." Dib quit talking. When he stayed quiet, Gaz walked up beside him—and stepped back just in time.

Dib slowly removed his foot from a bloodless hand with lightning nail polish. " _Zita?_ "

He dropped to his knees, the movement ruffling the teen fashion magazine caught halfway under Zita's body. It was definitely her; all the other corpses had uniforms.

Zita lay face-down in a pool of blood. Dib fumbled for a pulse. Gaz didn't have to do that much to know Zita was already room-temperature.

Dib took his shaking hand away. "But she didn't do the ritual with us. Why is she—"

"How could she not?" Gaz interrupted, diverting Dib's attention from his ex-classmate. "You only did it in the middle of a freaking cafeteria _full of people!_ "

Dib stared wide-eyed at his sister. "That doesn't make sense. If they're not in on the charm, then there's no reason for them to be here."

"You dragged them here. This is your fault."

"But the blog said—" Dib put a hand to his head. "It didn't say anything like this would happen. At least, I don't think so. It didn't even mention the ritual transporting people—only the wiki posts did."

"You had no idea what you were doing in the first place!" Gaz jabbed a finger down at him. "You didn't know this really _was_ a death school."

Dib surged to his feet and pointed back. " _You_ wanted to go with me!"

Gaz got in his face. "I didn't think it'd have people who _just died_ in it!" Dib backed up, bumped into Zita's body, and flinched. "That ghost said when you die here, you feel the pain of your death forever. Whatever happened to her—" Gaz pointed at Zita. "Eternal suffering. _Your fault_."

Dib clumsily sidestepped Zita's body and staggered backwards into the wall.

"You really screwed up this time, Dib." Gaz stalked up to him. "Now tell me how we're supposed to get outta here."

Dib kept his eyes on his sister's approaching boots. "It—it didn't say. I don't know how to leave."

Gaz stopped. The heavy air sat unbroken between them, until she turned and stormed off down the hall. She didn't look back, and if Dib said anything, the rushing in her ears blocked it out.

***

GIR clinked down the hall and slid around a corner. Without his disguise, he could really enjoy the air wooshing against his chrome.

He came to a rigid stop in the middle of another hallway, and darted his head around, taking in the deteriorated walls.

GIR turned his head 180 degrees. "Master?" He turned his body to match in rapid little steps. "Is you lost?" The hall didn't answer, so GIR yelled, "Does I hafta tape you to my head so you don't get lost?!"

High-pitched laughter came from the room to his left. GIR forgot whatever he was doing and pivoted toward it. The laughter came again, and GIR knew that room was made for him. Fun was in there.

As GIR started for the room, hands already grasping before they reached the door, a blue glow obscured his vision on both sides. The giggles were much closer now, and in stereo.

GIR swiveled his head from side to side, finding a boy and most of a girl. The fun had come out to meet him.

Both children reached out a hand. GIR, dancing excitedly in place, grabbed them. His feet swept into the air as the children swung GIR between them, all three laughing together.

Smiling even wider, GIR looked from the bloody-mouthed boy to the girl with her head missing above the jawline. He'd have to invite them for tea sometime.

The children swung GIR back, and flung him forward with incredible force.

" _Cannonball!_ " GIR flipped through the air, whooping with delight, and shattered against the wall.


	3. 1-W

Messages littered the school. Whether carved in decaying walls or inked on faded paper, they only served to heighten Zim's dread. Cries for help and tearful missives to mothers weren't going to help him find GIR and escape the school alive.

He should've been easy enough to locate. GIR was loud, bright, and often stored rancid things inside himself. Without GIR around, all Zim had to distract him was the rotting carcass of a building. The air was heavy and putrid, and none of the windows would open.

Zim's foot scuffed against something that crinkled, and he gasped. He mentally berated himself—it was just another piece of paper. He'd found enough of them taped to the walls, some half a century old.

This one was more recent. He recognized the haphazard scrawl.

_I went back and hid your body so I wouldn't be tempted to eat anymore. It looked weird with just the middle of your arm stripped to bone, so I evened it out. But that was the last time, I swear._

He crumpled the note into a ball, threw it down a hole, and hurried away. No need for more of that nonsense on his mind.

He returned to the red-paneled sliding door. Someone had closed it for him. He fled back down the hall and Pak-spidered up the stairs to the second floor.

Sweating, but not from exertion, he dropped to his feet in the second floor hallway. Something ripped against his Pak's top port as the metal legs retracted. A piece of paper had gotten caught on the tip, and it floated to his feet.

_It's probably a good thing I left Yuuichi behind. If he knew I'd eaten my best friend, he'd guilt-trip me over it forever. It was an accident! I was stuck in that classroom for days trying to get Yuuichi to stop freaking out!_

He'd seen that name scratched on the lectern in the room where he'd woken up. His back muscles tightened around the Pak's spinal connections, suddenly cold. He kicked the paper away and put distance between himself and the stairs.

He wound up back in front of classroom 1-A. He hadn't seen any corpses there, though it smelled terrible anyway. GIR had been so eager to get at whatever was behind the cabinet.

Zim's gaze tracked down the sliding door to the torn half-sheet of paper lying in front of it.

_The door to 1-A is stuck shut. I hope he starves to death in there._

Zim turned down another hall. They looked the same on every floor—same fake doors, same fake windows, same stairwell blocked with desks and chairs crammed on top of each other.

He threw himself against the tightly-packed desks, earning a sore shoulder for his effort. They didn't even creak. He turned to clump back down the stairs, and something came loose from the pile.

The handwriting on this note was especially meandering.

_I can't stop going back to where I hid you, Mari. I miss you so much, I just want to see you again. But I'm still so hungry. There's no food or water in this place. Whenever I see you, my mouth waters._

Darkness crowded around the edges of Zim's vision, closing in on the note.

_I can't take this. I can't take eating anymore of you. I have to make it so I can't look at you anymore._

Zim clenched his eyes shut. The first note had been tucked under the body of a girl with her eyes gouged out, but she hadn't stopped there. By the time she died, she no longer had a face.

Zim opened his eyes, but the image of that face replaced the stairs leading down. He backed up, Pak scraping against the pile of desks behind him, and the face followed. He swiped and clawed at it to no effect.

He stared at his hands, breath coming in harsh gasps. Only one way not to see that face anymore.

***

Dib crept through a darkened section of corridor on the second floor. He had a vague sense of a turn in the hall, and as he stepped around it, his foot landed on a small, hard cylinder.

He backed off, staring wide-eyed down at the floor. It was hard to make out, but the thing he'd almost crushed wasn't bone—it was metal.

The floor creaked a short distance behind. Dib tensed up, then reminded himself—weightless ghosts couldn't do that, and neither could immobile dead bodies.

He walked back out of the dark hallway. "Gaz?" The creaking continued, getting closer. "Hey, I was just thinking. Maybe we should stay togeth—"

A small form suspended on metal legs lurched out of the gloom at the end of the hall. It wasn't Gaz, but Dib knew better than to let the alien's posturing frighten him.

" _There_ you are," Dib said, striding up to Zim. "So you couldn't find a way out, either? Guess that makes us even." He stopped. Something was wrong with Zim's face, aside from the missing wig and contacts, but he wasn't close enough to determine what. "Have you seen Gaz around?"

Zim hadn't moved or responded. Dib risked a step closer, and froze. From the side, it looked more pink than green, alien blood dripping down numerous thin gashes. It was smeared all over his gloves, and his eyes were hollow.

Pak legs skittered against ruined wood to reposition Zim. Dib stared up and corrected himself. Zim's eyes weren't hollow—they were gone.

Zim's face split into a steaming grin, the inside of his mouth bubbling red with human viscera. The Pak legs bunched up, and Dib only had enough time to whirl towards the dark hallway before Zim lunged.

***

Future visitors to Heavenly Host Elementary left new messages around the school. Among dying messages and unheard pleas was a warning, taped beside a classroom door.

_There's a monster with metal legs patrolling the building. It's blind, but it can home in on the slightest sound. If you see the Spider, don't move. Don't even breathe. Maybe it'll go after someone else first..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wrong End 1: Alien Monster. Read all five Victim's Memoirs.


	4. 2: The Dark Space

After Pak-spidering upstairs, Zim quit running, but he didn't stop moving. As he walked, he darted his head around for any sign of his robot, or any long-haired, homicidal children.

The school's silence was oppressive; he hated that he was the only one making noise. Even his breathing was too loud.

A series of holes punched unevenly into the floor marked the end of the hall. He maneuvered across on the safe spots, holding his breath as he was forced to step next to a severed arm at one point. Its sleeve wasn't black or purple-striped, at least.

Past the holes was a darkness even Zim's optical implants couldn't penetrate. A pair of shallow furrows in the old wood turned the corner leading into it. He'd seen the same grooves worn into the floor around every doorway in his base.

He clenched his fists, and stepped forward. The rest of the light fell away as he walked into the darkness.

Almost immediately, his boot collided with something metal. Zim bit back a yelp, crouched, and picked up his SIR unit's limbless torso. The panel on the front was dark.

He held it close, staring into the blackness.

Twin teal circles blinked on in front of him. "Hi, Master!"

Zim's gloved claws scraped against the metal in his hands as he twitched. His idiot robot's head was smiling two feet away, eyelights reflecting off his scattered limbs.

Zim huffed. "Maybe this will teach you not to run off." He knelt and gathered GIR's arms and legs as he spoke. "This school is clearly too dangerous for you to be wandering around alone."

"I made friends," GIR said, rocking his head back and forth. "They blue like raspberries."

Zim picked GIR's head up by the antenna and held him at eye level, squinting. "And I suppose your 'friends' had nothing to do with this?"

"Oh, yeah, they did." GIR nodded in midair, nonchalant as a koolaid-smeared four-year-old.

Zim sighed. He had GIR's torso and limbs under one arm, so he carried the head under the other and stood.

Something buzzed overhead. Zim looked up, but no annoying black specks crossed his limited field of vision. A stench intensified out of the school's mustiness directly to his right, and he turned to find—not blood, not innards, but a plain wall.

Zim shook his head. His eyes told a different story than his antennae, so the sounds and smells were a lie.

The wall generated a dark stain. It reached the floor in seconds, and spread under Zim's feet. He backed away, eyes riveted on the stain as it oozed across the wood in a visceral splatter.

GIR's vocal synthesizer took on a girlish pitch. "Don't look at my insides."

Zim dropped GIR's head. He bounced, rolled, and bumped to a stop against the plain wall. GIR's eyes were a color Zim had never seen them in before—and back to cyan the next instant.

Zim blinked, glanced at the wall, and jerked his gaze away. He scooped up GIR's head and rushed out of the dark area before anything else decided to soak through the walls.

Back in better lighting, Zim put GIR back together. There was no internal damage, and the limbs and head had come off cleanly. Zim guessed that GIR had somehow hit the wall at high velocity. GIR ran into things all the time, sometimes making a game out of it, but never hard enough to pop off all his appendages at once.

GIR sang nonsense while Zim secured his limbs, then put the body aside to open GIR's head. He scrutinized the roomy interior, in case GIR had added something rotten.

Zim gasped. "The Zerikan power stone!" He fished out a smooth crystalline sphere, and cupped it in his hands. "I'd forgotten all about it." It easily filled both palms, glittering flecks swirling around its solid interior. Despite its shape, it had the curious quality of staying perfectly still wherever it was placed.

Zim opened the top port of his Pak and placed the stone inside. "You brought it too late for me to experiment on the schoolchildren, like I planned. But maybe it could be of some use." He peered up and down the hall, screwed GIR's head back on in swift turns, and set the robot on his feet. "Come on, GIR. The Dib _must_ be somewhere in this school."

***

Gaz walked alone on the second floor, a headache not helping her foul mood. A classroom door came up on her right. She nudged it with her boot, expecting another wall decoration, but it rattled.

She slid the door open and stepped inside. The room was dark, except for a light coming from the desk at the front—she couldn't see the source. It wasn't a classroom, but more like a nurse's office.

 _Some aspirin would be nice,_ Gaz thought, making a beeline for the white cabinet filled with labeled bottles.

She reached for the handle, and a soft thump came from the desk beside the cabinet. An open book, pages still settling, lay on the desk.

Dib would've made all kinds of noise if he'd seen that. That's how Gaz knew the book was probably haunted as hell. But once she noticed it, she couldn't stop from stumbling over to the desk, as if pushed by an invisible force.

She looked down at yellowed pages filled with precise handwriting. From the dates penned in the upper corners, it appeared to be someone's diary. That's all she could make of it, because the text was—

 _I seem to be dead._ The diary was in English. Gaz blinked; the writing had been vertical a second ago.

The entry continued in a more pleasant tone as the writer spoke of happy children and birthdays. It sounded like the school nurse enjoyed her job.

Gaz turned the page, read halfway down, and braced her hands on the desk. The diary's owner had recorded an assault by the principal in plain language. She had escaped to the stairs, and the principal had gone screaming after her.

_Just as I turned the corner, I felt him push me. The floor came at me fast—_

Gaz clutched the desk to keep from falling across it. The gut-wrenching sensation and the floorboards rushing up to her face hadn't been real.

The school nurse had died instantly, then written about it. Gaz continued reading, because her eyes wouldn't stop moving across lines of text.

The nurse's daughter had witnessed her death. Gaz went to turn the page, and an enveloping blackness gripped her face.

Footsteps smaller than hers echoed down sunset halls, chased by ones much heavier. Gaz had no real sense of where they were headed, but the small steps eventually stopped, and the heavy ones caught up.

The little girl's scream pierced her mind.

_I'll never forgive him._

Large, calloused hands wrapped themselves around the seven-year-old's neck. Gaz felt every crushing second of it.

_I'll kill them all._

She couldn't breathe. The nurse's voice leapt from the rapidly flipping pages of her diary into Gaz's mind.

_Sachi is my pride and joy. She'll do anything for me._

_Kill more._

Gaz forced her eyes open into a black mist.

_Bring me more._

She still had a death grip on the desk. She shoved back hard, and collided with the dividing curtain behind her. It clattered to the floor, the first noise in what felt like an eternity.

Gaz sat up fast. A humanoid form made entirely of black static stood by the desk in front of her. It turned to her with hands outstretched, the same ones it had clamped over Gaz's face.

Gaz kicked a loose floorboard at the black mist, jumped to her feet, and ran for the door.

The mist crackled in her ears. _I'll kill them all._

She slid the door shut behind her with an echoing crack down the decrepit halls. Bloody, child-sized handprints thumped against the row of windows from inside the nurse's office. Gaz dashed for the stairs she'd just ascended.

If Dib found that room, he'd get himself killed, but Gaz wasn't about to run back to his smug, ghost-loving face. She'd find a way out herself, even if it meant—

The hall lurched, and Gaz fell against the nearest wall to brace herself.

***

The school shook in another earthquake with zero warning as Dib walked down the middle of the hall. He had no choice but to duck down, cling to the floor, and hope he didn't fall into the hole right next to him.

He kept still after the shaking stopped, just breathing. Nothing happened in the next ten or so seconds, so he stood.

The hole next to him was gone. A new, bigger one replaced the corridor in front of him, extending too far into the darkness to make out the other side.

"Okay, now I _know_ the school is messing with me." He turned around. The now-inaccessible hallway led to the second-floor stairs, but there was another stairwell past the entrance.

He reached the eastern stairs in time for something cold and metal to come hurtling at his head. Dib screamed and clawed at the clinging body, eventually finding purchase on its middle, and pulled it off his scalp.

GIR waved hard, inches from Dib's face. "Miss meee?"

Dib made a disgusted noise and plunked GIR down. His heart thumped in his ears. "Don't do that!"

Zim stepped out of the stairwell. "GIR, I _told_ you—" He stopped, pivoted to look up at Dib, and gaped.

GIR pointed at Dib and announced, "I found him! Praise me!"

Zim huffed. "You found _one_ live body in this decomposing nightmare." He stepped up to Dib, looking him straight in the eye. "Tell me the way out of here, before I commit violence upon you."

The alien was in one piece—his wig wasn't even mussed—but the way he kept GIR close to his side and glanced at the stairwell made Dib guess something had spooked him.

Dib crossed his arms and smirked down at him. "Is the ghost school horse dookie _now,_ Zim?"

"Quit playing games and—you don't know, do you?"

Dib shifted his eyes to a ragged notice on the wall. "I'm working on it." He focused on Zim again. "You didn't see my sister upstairs, did you? I think she might be on the second or third floor."

Zim shook his head. "She couldn't be on the third floor. The only way up is barricaded."

Dib sighed. "Well, at least that eliminates one floor we'll have to search." He walked around Zim to the stairwell.

Zim stayed put. "Where are you going?"

Dib pointed up the stairs.

"I'm not going back there."

Dib dropped his arm. "I'm not gonna find Gaz down here. I've already been all over this floor... wait." He walked away from the stairs. "I haven't tried the entrance."

Zim kept up, his robot clinking alongside him. "Don't bother, Earth-stink. It's a dead end." He stopped at the entryway threshold. "The door's stuck."

Dib stepped over shoes scattered between shelves. "You were probably opening it wrong," he said, maneuvering around a gathered-up pile of footwear. "I bet it's—"

A blue glow flashed out of the corner of his eye. The little ghost-boy from before was standing at the end of the shelf to his right.

Dib yelped and tore his gaze away; he'd barely avoided looking into his eyes. He hadn't avoided seeing the tongue-stump inside the ghost's mouth.

Zim went wide-eyed as Dib raced out of the entryway toward him.

Dib explained as he hurtled past. "Murderghost! _Go!_ "

Zim grabbed GIR and extended his Pak legs to keep up.

-

Dib sat against the wall at the end of the corridor opposite the entrance, catching his breath. Zim wasn't winded, but held GIR by the shoulders, keeping the robot in front of him wherever he turned.

Dib ran a hand through his hair, brushing out pale dust from the previous earthquake. "Okay, entrance equals bad. And you refuse to go back upstairs. So now what?"

Zim's eyes lingered on a pile of bones ten feet away. "How did you know that ghost was dangerous?"

"Gaz said it was. I just took her word for it."

Zim drummed his claws on GIR's shoulders. "She'd probably enjoy a place like this."

"Not really." Dib rose to his feet, and squinted down another hall. "That wasn't there before."

Zim made one of his many inquisitive noises as he craned his neck to peer in that direction. "I can't see the other end."

Dib took a few steps toward the new corridor. Cold air wound its way up his trench coat sleeves without a breeze to carry it.

"Let's see where it goes," Dib said, and started walking. GIR's approaching giggles drowned out whatever protests Zim might have had, and the three of them entered the dark hallway together.

The air chilled like water. Dib wiped his hands on the front of his shirt, but the liquid sensation didn't go away.

Zim broke the silence first, as GIR was too busy attempting a variety of funny walks. "This isn't right. We should've reached the end by now."

Dib stopped and looked over his shoulder. Blackness had swallowed up the hall behind them.

Zim took GIR by the hand. "I'm going back."

"Wait." Dib faced forward again. The air had gained a water-like resistance. "It's probably the school doing this. I think it changes at will to mess with its victims. We probably can't go back."

Zim's footsteps shifted closer. "You're saying you've trapped us here?!"

Dib gnawed on his lower lip. Zim's words were too close to the mark.

Playful synthetic humming joined Zim's panicked breathing. Dib didn't need to guess where GIR was; he was easy to spot without his disguise. His optics alone were bright enough to light up the spot on the wall he was facing.

Dib pointed at the little robot. "I've seen him pop all sorts of crap out of his head before. Does he happen to have a flashlight in there?"

Zim took a few seconds to calm his breathing, then scoffed. "GIR doesn't _have_ a flashlight." He picked up GIR and positioned him under one arm. "He _is_ a flashlight!"

Zim twisted his robot's eyelights. A cyan beam cut through the gloom, accompanied by GIR making laser noises. Dib blinked rapidly at the sudden brightness illuminating the walls, ceiling, and floor ten feet ahead.

"Be amazed!" Zim said.

Dib shook out his arms as the phantom wetness slid away from his limbs. "Only if this leads somewhere that doesn't suck," he said, and continued onward.

A few more steps, and the corridor ended in a disheveled locker room. It had the same dim lighting as the rest of the school, so Zim returned GIR's eyes to a soft glow.

"Aww!" GIR moaned as Zim set him back on his feet. "My laser vision!"

Zim grabbed his robot's wrists as GIR tried to turn his eyelights back up. "No, GIR. No wasting power."

Dib scanned the room, taking in the ruined gym lockers, and the shower heads mounted on the wall. One of the locker rows lay on its broad side, with every door torn off.

Dib passed the remaining lockers, and went through a doorless exit leading to a set of ascending stairs. He didn't stop to consider its significance until the rain was already pelting his face.

"Hey!" He whirled to Zim, who was standing by the lockers. "I'm outside!"

Zim's eyes bulged. "Really?! If you're lying—"

Dib didn't wait for him to finish. He spun back around, took the stairs two at a time, and checked himself a foot from falling into a swimming pool. The water was a foul-smelling grey, and dark shapes floated just below the surface. There was no mystery to them, as a few had ashen hands and faces with flesh sloughing off just above the murk.

Stamping boots approached from behind, halted, and scuffed furiously backwards. Dib turned to the stairs as Zim finished rushing back down them.

"What?" Dib called. "Scared of a little rain?"

"I'm not going near that pool!" Zim snapped from behind the doorway. "It's _disgusting!_ "

Dib glanced at the pool. It reeked, and the bloated dead bodies with empty eyes weren't appealing. But the school was littered with human corpses. If anything, Dib thought, Zim should be celebrating.

He looked down the stairs again. "What if there's a way out up here?"

GIR clinked around inside the locker room. He stopped, then ran for the doorway with increasingly noisier steps, until Zim snagged him by the back of his skinny neck.

The robot struggled and made squeaky grunts as Zim replied. "I saw what was up there already. It's nothing but trees all around."

Dib sighed. "Fine! I'm gonna try looking anyway, so just wait there. And don't go back through that hallway without me!"

The chain-link fence around the pool looked scalable, but the pine trees beyond grew from an impenetrable darkness. Dib made his way around the pool, keeping close to the fence, and away from the water's edge. Only raindrops disturbed the surface, but Dib wasn't about to see if the pool contained more than bodies.

Rain on pavement droned around him as reached another set of stairs. Boards and chains blocked the bottom, with a lopsided, humid-damp notice slapped over them. _Pump Room - Out of order._

Dib ran a hand through his hair, and shook droplets off his fingers. His search had only gotten him soaked. With another sigh, he turned and went back up the stairs.

A small blue object stood in the corner of the third step—Dib hadn't seen it on the way down, tucked away as it was. He leaned over and picked up a thin column of dull crystal, and ran his thumb over its rough surface. He knew this mineral: kyanite. It was one of the crystals that protected against negative spiritual energy, and he used to fill his pockets with a variety of them when he went ghost-hunting. He hadn't used kyanite in particular since he broke into the nosferatu house down the street several years ago.

He stuffed the kyanite in an inside pocket and ascended into the rain. Protective crystals vaporized once expended, and they wouldn't be easy to come by in a death school dimension.

Dib returned to the locker room. Zim was standing by the showers, arms crossed, as GIR rolled a rusted valve handle around the floor.

Zim's eyes flicked up at Dib. "Took you long enough."

"At least I tried doing something useful." He pulled back the right arm of his trench coat to wipe moisture off his face with a shirt sleeve. "Let's go back."

He lowered his arm. Zim hadn't moved.

"You must have found something." Zim made it a statement. "It shouldn't have taken you _that_ long just to walk around the pool."

Dib pulled his trench coat sleeve back down. The pocketed kyanite rubbed against his chest.

Zim stepped forward. "What are you keeping from me?"

"None of your business," Dib said, and he practically saw the alien's non-existent hackles rise.

"What is it, you vile little worm?!" Zim stalked up in quick steps and grasped the front of Dib's coat in both hands. "It must be something _helpful_ if you don't want to show it to me!"

Dib yanked his coat out of Zim's hands. He'd almost touched where the inside pocket was.

"Even if I _did_ find something, if I gave it to you, you'd just waste it." Dib backed up a step in case Zim decided to lunge again. "Once I find Gaz, I'm gettin' outta here."

Zim dropped his grab-ready hands an inch. "You're just going to leave me here? Was that the point of your little ghost ritual?!"

Dib opened his mouth, then closed it. He glanced at the connecting dark corridor. "I just... I wanted to investigate." His hesitation was damning enough. "The ritual doesn't work with only one person."

"But you had Gaz!" Zim said, claws half-clenched. "Why bother involving _me_ in your—"

He shut his mouth, eyes searching the dislodged grey tiles. The rain outside failed to fill the silence.

Dib swallowed against the dryness in his throat. "Look, I didn't think it was gonna be this bad—"

"You dragged me to this death school to get rid of me," Zim hissed. "That's _just_ what you were planning, you slime!"

"All I knew was this place was haunted!" An invisible pressure gripped Dib's chest. "I didn't know it was some kinda soul-harvesting hell-hole!"

Zim yanked GIR off the floor and held him under one arm. With a harsh twist, he turned GIR's eyelights on full-blast in Dib's face. Dib threw up his arms to shield his eyes, already blinded, as Zim scurried into the hall.

"Wait!" Dib yelled. He broke into a run after the cyan light bobbing in and out of the obscuring blotch in his vision.

The dark corridor ended as they returned to the building proper in less than a minute. Zim turned the eyelights back down, dumped GIR to the floor, and continued on with forceful strides. GIR hopped to his feet and scampered after him.

" _Wait!_ " Dib stopped at the intersection of three halls. "Would you just stop for a second and _listen_ to me?!"

Zim ignored Dib and kept walking, but he couldn't ignore the bestial yell of a broad-shouldered man shambling out of the darkness straight ahead. Black liquid leaked from the man's red eyes, and he swung a sledgehammer beside him like a twig as he came at them in a lumbering rush.

Zim burst into a paroxysm of piercing screeches, and bolted down the south hall. Alien screaming was all Dib heard as he took the same corridor at a dead run.

Dib turned into another hall as the entryway loomed close; no use getting cornered with a possible murderghost. The wall by the west stairwell came up fast, and he had to hit the wall open-palmed to check his momentum.

He leaned on the wall and gulped in wood-moldy air. He kept his gaze on the floor to avoid seeing the corpse of the girl with her skull smashed in right beside him. Now he knew exactly what had killed her.

Chest still heaving, Dib whipped around to look behind him. No thundering footsteps, no guttural roars, no hammerman.

And no Zim. The first floor was silent.


	5. 2-W

"What if there's a way out up here?"

Zim had to restrain his hyperactive robot before answering Dib. "I saw what was up there already. It's nothing but trees all around."

"Fine," Dib said. "If I find a way out, I'm just gonna go. I don't need you whining behind me the whole way."

Dib walked away from the steps, while Zim dug his claws into the door frame.

"Insolent little monkey." He shoved GIR toward the showers, and bared gritted teeth as he ascended the stairs with quick, silent steps. "If I can get _out_ of the school, I can get on _top_ of the school. We'll see who whines when Zim goes somewhere you can't follow."

His sibilant muttering ended as he emerged at the poolside. He kept low to the ground as raindrops slid off his paste coating; Dib was on the other end of the pool, back turned to Zim.

Zim stood and rushed for the fence, then stopped. He'd only gone forward a few steps, but something in the pool arrested his attention. Or was it beside the pool? He couldn't tell. He had to take a closer look.

He took slow steps toward the reeking grey water. Pale bodies in dark clothes bobbed in it like a sickening stew, but even that wasn't enough to drive him away.

The tips of Zim's boots peeked over the pool's edge as he peered into the water, transfixed. Instead of his disguise, the rain-distorted reflection showed sagging skin, crooked antennae, and optical implants bulging unevenly out of their sockets.

Ice gripped his mind as his reflection swayed up to meet him.

-

Dib gave the body-ridden pool a wide berth, running his fingertips along the side of the chain-link fence on the perimeter. It looked sturdy enough to hold his weight, and he wanted to prove Zim wrong more with each step, but he couldn't spot anything between the trees except inky blackness. There weren't even any bug sounds coming from the forest.

The rain started coming down harder—according to his ears, but not his soaked scalp. Dib mentally sorted out the noise; it was less like rain hitting pavement, and more like meat sizzling on a grill.

Dib spun on his heel, and his stomach dropped.

A bubbly green puddle was spreading across the pool's surface from the north side. Blue sparks from a half-submerged Pak illuminated Zim's exposed skeleton, acrid smoke curling up from the bones.

Dib's body reacted before he could form anything coherent to yell, and he ran to the head of the pool. If he could at least recover Zim's Pak, then maybe—

Dib turned sharply as he rounded the bend, and his feet flew out from under him. He slammed shoulder-first into the concrete, and slipped off the pool's edge.

Foul water and Irken biomatter rushed into his mouth, nose, and eyes, scouring like acid on contact. The last thing Dib heard was the sizzling between his ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wrong End 2: Pool.


	6. 3: Snag

Dib exited the stairs onto the building's third floor. At this height, the walls and floor creaked even when he stood still. The row of windows facing the stairwell offered no light in the short, dingy grey hall.

Half the floor had rotted through, and there were only two other doors. Signs hung askew above both, but the writing was too faded to see what grades the classrooms belonged to. The door furthest away was only accessible over a chunk of splintered paneling over a pit, so Dib went to the door closer to him first.

Rectangular red and white seals with illegible handwriting covered the door. He didn't have to know how to read them to know what they were for—an unseen darkness pulsed from behind the door. When Dib came within two feet of it, an abrupt urge to run across the rickety paneling over the pit manifested.

He backed off, and his sense of self-preservation rushed up his spine. He shook his head; those flimsy pieces of paper were the only things keeping the negative energy in check.

The kyanite vibrated in his inside pocket. Dib flinched, then remembered why he had it in the first place. He fished out the rough crystal, and held it up to the door.

A tingling numbness enveloped his hand, cold needles in the joints of his fingers, then the kyanite shattered. The negative energy blew away like smoke, and the talismans fluttered to the floor. They curled and crinkled away from Dib's boots as he slid the door open and entered.

It wasn't a classroom at all—too small, too many faucets, and too many urinals. A mirror hung above the restroom sinks, but Dib knew better than to look in the mirrors of any haunted building. He may have trapped an unknown number of innocents in the school, but he _still_ wasn't dumb enough to look up and see a stab-happy ghost behind his reflection.

Because once he did, it'd be too late.

He threw a glance over his shoulder—just a wall. He let out his breath and sat heavily on the restroom floor, rubbing his face with both hands.

"It's this school," he muttered. "It's doing something. There's only been some dead bodies and a couple ghosts, but it's _doing_ something to me."

He looked askance at the rust-stained pipes under the sinks. Deep scratches adorned the sections of wall between them. Dib got on his hands and knees to inspect.

He moved his lips silently as he read:

_join all scraps_

_repeat Sachiko's charm_

_but don't mess it up this time_

Dib shuffled back from the sinks and rose up on his knees. "How'd we mess it up before?" He wiped his gritty hands on his jeans, and stood. "It had to be Zim. He didn't care about the ritual."

He thought for a moment; his paper scrap was still in his pants pocket. If he wanted to try escaping at all, he had to find Gaz and Zim first. His stomach knotted—he'd driven off both.

Raising his head, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. He whirled in the opposite direction, yanking himself out of the restroom by the doorframe.

He let his breath out slowly in the hall. There hadn't been any ghosts in the mirror, or anything about to stab him, but Dib wondered when he'd started looking so depressed.

-

Dib returned to the first floor, the last place he'd seen Gaz and Zim. He'd experienced more threats on that floor than the others, Zombie Hammerman being the freshest and most vivid memory. He didn't know where the little boy ghost was, and started to regret using the kyanite to unseal a dirty restroom.

He reached a red-paneled sliding door, and stopped. A corpse, spattered in congealed blood, sat slumped in a shadowed corner right next to it. He would have overlooked it completely if it wasn't wearing Zim's wig and contacts.

Dib stared at the disheveled disguise, then buried his face in his hands with a long groan. "Did he _really_ think that was gonna work?"

He lowered his hands; the corpse sat between two doors. He'd explored this part of the school before the last quake happened, shortly before running into Zim and GIR. Scrutinizing the new door, he did his best to quash any hope that it would open. But that was hard to do when the rain outside made it quiver inside its frame.

Zim had definitely gone this way, probably while escaping the guy with the hammer. Maybe the door worked. Maybe it only worked for Zim.

Dib took a deep breath, and opened the completely functional sliding door. Cold, moist air blew in from outside and stuck to his skin.

He rushed onto the breezeway, and stopped halfway across. Another building loomed in front of him. There was a whole other wing to the soul-eating death school.

Dib peered out over the rickety railing. Both sides showed the same scenery: barren ground strewn with loose roofing tiles, a pitch-black forest looming a few yards away. Running into the woods didn't seem like a smart idea.

A man screamed above him—long, loud, and approaching fast. He didn't register what was happening until something heavy hit the ground.

Heart in his throat, Dib jerked his head left, where the screaming had come to a violent stop. A well-dressed middle-aged man lay dead next to the other building.

Theories wormed their way through Dib's confusion. One of the few papers tacked to the school walls not written by a victim was a notice from the principal himself. In as melancholy a tone as professionalism would allow, he'd announced a regrettable school closure due to his own vices.

Another dying scream shocked Dib out of his thoughts. He looked up this time, and saw Yanagihori's final visage before he hit the empty ground once more. The man's eyes and mouth were wide open all the way down.

Dib turned his back on the body—it was just going to vanish, anyway. "It's a suicide loop," he told the covered walkway. "It's like this school is his personal hell, or something."

This raised more questions about the nature of the little boy ghost, and all the underage corpses littering the school. Perhaps the principal was responsible for students dying while the school still operated. If forever reliving his death meant he regretted what he'd done, it obviously wasn't enough for the school to stop killing children.

Dib didn't jump when the next scream came. He hated how he was already used to the sound of someone dying. He turned to look at the body one more time, and saw something glint.

He walked to the other end of the covered walkway and leaned over the railing. A small key had fallen out of Principal Yanagihori's breast pocket.

Dib vaulted himself over the railing, snatched the key, and hopped back onto the walkway before another body could fall. He'd just stolen from a teacher, but it _was_ a hell dimension.

With the key tucked into a pocket, Dib slid the annex door open, and entered.

He nearly backed out the second he set foot in the small entryway. Thick air gripped his head with throbbing pressure. Dib planted his feet to keep them from scuffing back for the walkway, clenched his fists, and shut his eyes tight. _This is the right place to be, or it wouldn't hurt this much._ He opened his eyes, letting his breath out slowly. _Whatever curse this school's under must be stronger here. There's something it doesn't want me to find._

He left the entryway for another room. Every step came with a slight pull on his legs, like something was trying to drag him down through the floorboards.

He'd only seen two rooms so far, but the annex seemed a lot less rotted-through and hole-riddled than the first building. Maybe less victims had made it there. The air, though choked with headache-inducing negativity, lacked that old roadkill smell.

The second room connected to a long stairway. The creaking there echoed from high up, though it was too dark to see past the first few steps upward. Dib kept his eyes on his feet as he climbed, exercising more caution in going up the stairs than he'd ever cared to.

He was starting to think he'd found the stairway version of the endless corridor when a cyan light darted through the gloom ahead. Following it into a room off one of the stairwell's landings brought Dib two things. First, the stench of decomposing meat, and GIR, poking the source, tongue lolling out in a big smile.

"Hey," Dib said. GIR's head whirled to face him, still grinning, still prodding the body with a pointy metal finger. "Where's Zim? Is he in this building?"

GIR shook his head with soft mechanical whirring noises. "I not seen 'im. He got lost a- _gain_." He pouted. Dib couldn't tell if the little robot was honestly exasperated, because he kept poking the corpse.

"Okay. Guess you haven't seen Gaz either, right?"

GIR went all smiles again and nodded. "Ah _deeyid!_ She was—" His face went blank, poking finger on automatic. The body's abused shoulder squished at every touch. GIR twitched back to reality and said, "I dunno. Stairs are fun."

Dib sighed. "Nevermind. Lousy scatterbrained thing."

He crouched by the corpse, opposite the side GIR was poking. It clutched a small drawstring bag, caked in blood and soil, in one of its rigor-mortised hands.

"What the..." Dib reached for the bag, then flicked his gaze to the student ID card on the body's jacket. He extended a hand, then pulled back—it was in Japanese, anyway.

GIR stopped poking and ripped the ID card off the jacket. He held it up in both hands, one bloody. "What's a Kaydween?"

"Quit that!" Dib snatched the ID away from GIR. "You're desecrating the... oh forget it, you already did." He inspected the ID; whatever GIR had read off didn't sound Japanese. Below the symbols on the student's ID were six letters written in red marker: Kedwin.

Dib laid the ID back on the uniform jacket, and returned to the drawstring bag. Cringing inwardly, he pried open stiff fingers, wincing when one cracked in his haste to get it over with, and slipped the bag free of its fleshy confines.

Though dirty, the bag resting in Dib's palm wasn't wet or squishy. Something feather-light rested inside, but he couldn't determine anything from the odd bulge it made in the fabric.

Dib uncinched the bag's opening and peeked inside. "Aw, gro—"

His vision veered sharply floorward.

Someone dug into the dirt across from Dib in a dark room, dumping it in dry, crumbling clods.

_I can't allow you to tell another living soul about what I did._

A shovel clanged to the ground next to a thick-set man.

_I'm going to fix it so you never say another word._

Something snipped in the small subterranean room—kitchen shears, or sewing scissors. They snipped a few more times, only cutting air. Then staccato meat-squelches filled Dib's ears. It was like raw hamburger squeezing through bare fingers.

It ended with one final snip. Dib wasn't sure if the labored breathing that followed was his, or from the middle-aged man in the brown suit.

Something cold pricked the tip of his nose. "Beep!"

Dib yelped as his eyes flew open. GIR's face was inches from his as the robot stooped over, ready to poke him again.

"I'm not dead yet!" Dib levered himself up off the floor, shooing GIR away with one arm. "So don't poke me! In fact, don't do it ever!"

GIR flopped on his back with a clank. "Aww!"

While GIR rolled over to the corpse, Dib sat upright and adjusted his crooked glasses. The drawstring bag was on the floor next to Kedwin, shriveled-up tongue still inside.

"Okay, _that's_ haunted," Dib muttered. "No more touching severed tongues."

He rose to his feet by degrees. He'd seen the man in the brown suit before. Yanagihori was probably in the middle of another jump.

"Hey, GIR."

The little robot spun his head backwards to face Dib, while he continued smooshing Kedwin's cheeks. "Mmmyeees?"

"I got a present for ya."

GIR spun the rest of his body around to match his head. "Where?!"

Dib pointed at the drawstring bag.

"Woohoo!" GIR snatched up the bag and dumped it into his head. "I'm a two-tongued cowboy!"

"And _don't_ eat it," Dib said. "I might need it later."

GIR made no indication that he understood as he ran in circles, singing about the yummy nastiness inside his head.

Dib crossed his arms and turned away from the body to scan the room. He'd just come from the stairwell, and a hole blocked one of the other doors. That left the third exit on the other side of the room, leading to a corridor.

"I'm going to look for the others," Dib said, watching window-framed lightning flash in the hallway ahead. "So if you wanna find Zim, you should probably come with..." Thunder rumbled outside. GIR wasn't singing anymore. "Hello?"

Dib turned back to Kedwin's corpse. Zim's little robot had disappeared.

***

Gaz didn't know how long she'd been wandering around the annex—the intermittent hazy vision and migraines made it hard to tell. The building's air had attempted a choke-hold on her brain the instant she entered. She had never cared much for Dib's boring ghost crap, but this was probably what "negative spiritual energy" felt like.

She'd gotten turned around somewhere, and couldn't find the exit. The current hallway was too familiar, and so were all the doors. She stumbled and caught herself against one—it rattled. She opened it and stepped inside.

As Gaz slid the door shut behind her, the pressure in her head eased a bit. She took a steady breath in, then out, and walked to lean back against one of the desks. It was one of six grouped together, but they were too large to belong to any student. Papers spilling from manila folders and scattered around the floor gave the impression of a staff room abandoned in screaming haste.

The door flew open, and Gaz jerked her head up, biting down a shriek.

"Gaz?" Zim stepped in, all red bug-eyes and black antennae, and shut the door. "Is that really you?"

Gaz forced her fingers to unclamp from the desk edge behind her. She didn't know whether to be enraged or disturbed at how badly she'd been startled. "What do you think? I'm not dead or glowing, am I?"

Zim looked miffed, but didn't have a retort. As Zim did a quick scan of the room, Gaz gave him a once-over. He'd apparently lost his disguise somewhere, along with that annoying robot. His loud bravado was missing, too, and he seemed smaller than usual without it.

Zim stepped closer to Gaz. "Have you seen GIR?"

Gaz shook her head. "Dib's not around, either."

Zim's face twisted into a scowl. "That vomitous _scum!_ Your brother wanted to leave me here to die. That's why he took me to this school! Did you know that?!" He grabbed the front of Gaz's hoodie. " _You knew, didn't you!_ "

It took every ounce of Gaz's deteriorating self-control to not throw Zim across the room. "Get off me before I put your head through a window."

The school windows were as immovable as concrete. Zim released Gaz and backed off, keeping his accusing eyes on her.

Gaz sighed and boosted herself up to sit on the desk. "Look, Dib didn't know what he was doing. He doesn't even know a way back out." Zim didn't look surprised. "But I think I do."

Zim's eyes widened and his antennae perked. "You do? Really? Tell me!" He clenched and unclenched his claws, but didn't go for the hoodie again.

"I think we have to appease the ghosts," Gaz said, and Zim grimaced. "The principal here killed the school nurse, then killed the nurse's daughter. So now they're all pissed-off and homicidal."

"Was her daughter a little girl? Long black hair, red dress, completely insane?"

Gaz couldn't recall any description of the school nurse's daughter beyond her age. "Something like that. So if we do something for the nurse, maybe they'll let us go."

Zim's antennae dropped flat. "But what would a murderghost want? A _sacrifice?_ "

Gaz shrugged. "Dib could probably figure it out. Ghosts are kinda his thing."

Zim glowered at the floor. "Relying on that wretched _pig_ for release after what he did to me—" He hissed in his breath and growled. "Still, I don't care to spend another moment in this..." He fumbled for words, then shut his eyes tight. " _Worm_ facility."

Gaz slid off the desk, goth boots hitting the floor loud enough to make Zim jump. "Then let's go find him."

Zim composed himself enough to nod. "And GIR."

Gaz raised an eyebrow, but didn't argue. "Whatever. If we do find him, you'd better keep him out of the way."

She walked past Zim, who seemed happy enough to follow behind, and put her hand on the door.

Something rippled across her vision.

"What's taking you so long?"

Gaz shook her head, slid the door open, and stepped into the corridor.

She promptly collapsed on her hands and knees, coughing up strand after matted strand of slick, black hair.

Zim's panicked shrieks made it through the cotton in her ears, as did his quickly receding footsteps. Throat burning, Gaz pulled herself up, using the wall for support. She tried to call Zim back, but her voice caught.

She looked at the pile of hair on the floor, and her stomach churned. The longer she stared at it, the more she felt a little girl's eyes staring back.

Gaz sensed the same pull from that wad of hair as she did from the entire school. It _wanted_ her.


	7. 3-W

The dust-caked, useless space heaters lent an almost cozy feel to the staff room. Papers strewn over clustered desks and spread across the floor made it seem like all the teachers had left in a great hurry.

Among the clutter was something that didn't belong. The knife lying on an abandoned memo between two groups of desks stuck out, even in a school full of rotting bodies. Gaz crouched over the knife for a closer look. It definitely wasn't a kitchen tool—the tapered edge and honed point marked it as an implement of bodily harm.

The tip appeared rusty, to Gaz's disappointment, until she picked it up and saw it was just dried blood. She cleaned the tip carefully on her hoodie front. The blade looked sharp enough, and probably hadn't been in the school much longer than her.

Gaz closed the switchblade and stored it in her hoodie pocket. She was more a fan of blunt force, but she could make exceptions in a bloodthirsty hell dimension.

Feeling safer than she had in hours, Gaz left the staff room. If whoever last owned the knife still needed it, that was just too bad. It was _her_ protection now.

-

Someone spoke to her who wasn't there. One of the school's new tricks, Gaz supposed. She filed it away with the heavy air, cranial pressure, and leaden limbs, continuing on her way.

The corpse by the art room was coming up. They'd died in a particularly gruesome, torso-shredding way, but at least now Gaz knew what to expect. She was careful not to look into the body's bloodshot eyes or exposed chest cavity as she walked past.

_Lovely, isn't it?_

Voices and thoughts that weren't hers. She shut her eyes and shook her head, plunging a hand into her hoodie pocket. She wrapped her fingers around the knife—still there.

She opened her eyes. The corpse stared back. Every vein in its eyes stood out as little red roots. She wondered what would make someone's eyes do that.

_I can show you._

Gaz grabbed fistfuls of hair in both hands. Something clattered to the floor; she'd dropped the knife when she pulled her hand out of her pocket. She stooped quickly to pick it up, fingers brushing the corpse's shirt in the process.

After making sure the folded knife was undamaged, her eyes went back to the corpse. Now only inches away, it smelled, but not much, and the shirt still held some warmth. They must have died only hours ago.

She also had a perfect view of the victim's broken-open ribcage. Lungs no longer inflating, heart no longer pumping, liver missing. The spine was twisted behind the mess.

Gaz wanted to stand up. She couldn't. She wanted to turn her face away. She couldn't.

She wanted to hate what she was seeing.

_A fine piece of work, if I do say so myself. If it were me, I would've done it more like... this._

She watched the hand holding the knife flick the switchblade out—effortless, practiced, as if it was muscle memory. Her fingers deftly repositioned the switchblade, and lowered for the corpse's lungs.

Gaz swung her other hand over and grabbed her wrist. Her knife-arm felt like someone else's.

"Gaz!"

Before she could stop, her neck moved on its own to make her look down the hall.

"Finally!" A kid, maybe thirteen, with weird hair, glasses, and a trench coat ran up to meet her. "I was starting to think you weren't in this building."

Gaz stood. The boy in front of her was smiling, trying to catch his breath.

His eyes flicked down to Gaz's hand. "Where'd you get that knife?"

Gaz lunged and buried the switchblade to the hilt just under Dib's ribcage.

_You're such a fast learner._

Blood poured over Gaz's hands and soaked into her sleeves. It wasn't warm or slippery. It wasn't hers to feel.

_Come with me, and I'll teach you everything I know._

The boy gurgled, and Gaz yanked the blade left. The resulting convulsion was nothing short of exquisite, the boy's eyes rolling back into his head.

_I've waited so long for you, my precious little sister._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wrong End 3: Yuuya Kizami.


	8. 4: Infer the Desired

Dib almost didn't stop before walking into a gaping hole in the floor; Gaz was coming out of the adjoining hall up ahead. He raised a hand, and only just kept himself from calling out to her.

It was his fault Gaz had left in the first place. He lowered his hand, and thought about ducking behind a nearby corner, but Gaz had already seen him.

"I kinda figured you'd be here," Gaz said as she approached. She had shadows under her eyes, and was a little out of breath. Had she been running? From what? "I think I know how to escape."

"Yeah, same here," Dib said, releasing the tension from his shoulders. It didn't seem like Gaz was there to yell at him. "Wait... you went into the boys' restroom?"

Gaz sneered. " _No._ What're you _talking_ about?"

"Oh. Anyway, I found a message there, and it said we have to put the paper doll scraps back together, and redo the ritual to get out." He put up both hands in a halting gesture when Gaz raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, I know, and it's not that simple. It also said not to do it wrong this time, but I have no idea what we're supposed to do different."

"Vague crap written on the bathroom wall. That's the best you can do?"

"Well _sorry,_ " Dib said. "It was probably some poor guy's dying message, and people tend not to worry about how vague they are before they croak." Gaz grunted and studied the nearby hole. "We need to find Zim before we can try it, though."

"There was one other thing," Gaz said, lifting her head. "Maybe we could appease the ghosts to get out."

"Really? _All_ of 'em? Because there's like..." Dib gestured at the cracked walls. "Kind of a lot of dead people around here."

"I mean the ghost who started the curse. Have you been to the nurse's office at this school?"

Dib shook his head. "Just some classrooms. And a pool."

Gaz crossed her arms and focused on the hole in the floor again. "Well, I found this diary..."

Her explanation didn't take more than two minutes, but the way Gaz went from crossing her arms to gripping them lightly made Dib wonder what was left out. What she included was chilling enough.

Dib let out a long breath. "Wow. The angry murderghost thing suddenly makes a lot more sense. That, and the principal jumping off the roof."

"Where was that?"

"Outside, by the breezeway. I'm guessing you didn't see it." Gaz shrugged, so Dib continued. "That guy was a real piece of work. After he did all that stuff you read about, he dug up the little girl, and cut her tongue out."

" _That's_ probably it," Gaz said, almost cutting off the end of Dib's sentence. "I bet that sicko stashed it somewhere. If we took it back—"

"I found it, actually." Dib cringed. "But I gave it to Zim's horrible little robot."

Gaz stared at him for a beat. "You're an idiot."

"It was making me crazy!" Dib protested, and Gaz rolled her eyes. "Seriously! It gave me this... _tongue_ -vision! I couldn't hold on to the gross thing, even if I wanted to!"

"Whatever," Gaz said, walking past him. "Let's just go find him. Your dumb alien's looking for him, anyway."

***

Zim entered the stairwell. His footsteps echoed, so he peered straight up—no use. It was too dark. The school snatched away its meager light in the most inexplicable places.

The more he dwelled on it, the less going upstairs sounded like a good idea. He took one step back into the doorway, and something flopped in the corner.

Zim riveted his eyes in that direction and quit breathing. Nothing moved. Then the disemboweled corpse lying in the corner convulsed in a ragdoll seizure, and he screamed.

The cadaver's disarranged guts parted with a wet squelch as cyan lights and bloody chrome emerged. "Hi, Master!"

Zim recoiled. "GIR, that's _revolting!_ Get out of that carcass right n—"

The instant Zim took one authoritative step forward, GIR's optics flipped to dark static. Zim jerked to a stop—GIR's eyes had malfunctioned the same way before, when Zim found him in pieces by the bleeding wall.

GIR's lower jaw dropped to his torso as he emitted a childish giggle. It wasn't his—it was the laughter that had chased Zim through the red-paneled door.

GIR spasmed once, and his eyes flicked back to cyan. "I gotchuuu a present!" He stepped out of the corpse, fluid-streaked, and reached for the top of his head.

"Wait, GIR. There's something wrong with you." Zim crept closer, hands outstretched. "Stand still so I can fix you."

He came within an inch of his robot before GIR's eyes buzzed into static. He hissed in Zim's face, who jumped back with a shriek.

Despite the library flashbacks, this wasn't anything like duty mode gone awry. The movements and sounds GIR was making were utterly unlike anything he'd ever done.

GIR lolled his head on one spherical shoulder and smiled at Zim. "I'm gonna have _fun_ with—" He snapped up straight again. "It was _you!_ Are you _mocking_ me?!" First the little girl in the red dress, then someone else entirely. Multiple voices vied for control of GIR's vocal synthesizer.

"Stop that!" Zim's command was drowned out by GIR's multi-layered moaning.

The robot sobbed with a stranger's voice. "Asami, why did you eat me?"

Zim backed up, but didn't dare turn his head to see how close the wall was. If he took his eyes off GIR for an instant—

Something rattled against the inside of his Pak. It didn't startle him; it was the Zerikan power stone he'd retrieved from GIR before. The stone came from a race of extinct aliens—powerful psychics, but total pacifists. The Irken Empire had run roughshod over their planet, decimating all life in a week.

Zim took the stone out as GIR staggered toward him, leaving gooey red footprints. It vibrated in his claws, inner flecks darting wildly around its interior. Vortian studies showed that Zerikans used them to trap their emotions, and amplify their mental powers. Zim had been eager to test it on the schoolchildren—no doubt it had amazing mind-control capabilities.

GIR lurched closer, swiping the air two feet in front of his master's face. Zim whipped his arm back and threw the stone.

It pinged off GIR's head, shattering in a blinding flash. Zim ducked his head and shielded his eyes with his arms, but peeked between them as GIR began death-screaming in a hundred voices at once. The robot convulsed in a cobalt light, hovering a few inches off the floor, limbs rattling so hard they threatened to separate. The tiny flecks that had been inside the stone swarmed GIR like shining gnats, coalesced on his head, and faded.

The screams silenced in rapid succession, until only GIR's remained, petering out in a tinny squeak. His eyes flicked off, and he pitched forward. The top of his head popped open as it hit the floor, and a small, bloody drawstring bag flopped out. Smoky black tendrils rose from the filth-stiff fabric, and vanished without a trace.

Zim's antennae quivered in the ensuing silence. He knelt by GIR, and picked the bag up by his clawtips. He peeked inside, closed it, stood, and drew his arm back to chuck it upstairs.

"Nooo!" GIR jumped to swing on Zim's arm with sticky hands. "We _needs_ it!"

Zim yelped and shook GIR off, ready to bolt. GIR sat there, staring up at him—still bloody, but with normal eyes.

"Mary says so," GIR added.

Zim curled his lip at the stained bag with the dried-up human tongue. " _Dib_ said we need this?"

GIR nodded, his short antenna waving with the movement. "Uh-huh."

Zim looked from GIR's innocent expression to the tongue bag he held by thumb and forefinger, and sighed. "That wretch had _better_ have a good reason. Because if he doesn't..." He picked GIR up one-handed by the back of the robot's neck, and stood him on his feet. "He's probably still in this building."

Zim glanced at the tongue bag. He refused to store such a vile object in his Pak, and there was no way he was letting GIR keep it again. He supposed he'd just have to hold it until he found that stupid human.

GIR sucked on one metal hand, and popped it out of his mouth. Zim shuddered; at least it wasn't bloody anymore.

He took his robot's spit-shined hand. "You're coming with me to find him, and you're not going _anywhere_ else."

Zim turned on his heel and marched out of the dark stairwell. GIR stumbled in small, rapid steps, then kept pace with his master's stride.


	9. 4-W

Zim hadn't meant to stop on the outdoor walkway. He wanted to run straight to the other building, away from the hulking, grey-faced zombie bleeding black out of his eyes.

But he halted halfway to the annex, chest heaving, and looked over his shoulder. Nobody had followed him through the open sliding doors—not the monstrous hammer-human, not Dib, not even GIR. Going back for either of them was probably suicide.

Zim swallowed and faced the building looming ahead. He decided nothing good awaited him there, but compared to the place he'd just left, it was only speculation.

He took off running for the annex. As his hands clutched the sliding doors, the previous set slammed closed on the other end of the walkway.

He froze. Rain thrummed on the breezeway roof above, the only other sound, until he remembered to breathe.

He spun to face the first building—nothing, no one. The sliding door was closed. Zim let out his breath, and turned back around to open the annex doors.

He reached his hand straight for a tongueless ghost child's face.

The impulse to leap away was all Zim could muster, because one glance at those empty eyes had him locked in place. The murderghost Dib had bleated about earlier aimed his outstretched arms for Zim's face, lips and voice working and failing to form words that required a tongue.

Zim's Pak reacted to the immediate threat on its unresponsive shell's life. The top port opened, ejecting a vibrating spherical object. It arced over Zim's head, dropped inside the inches-wide space between his face and the ghost's, and exploded in a flash of swirling particles.

The rain faded back into existence as Zim came to, curled up on the walkway before the annex. He shoved himself to his feet, and cast about for any threats. The ghost boy was gone, as was the Zerikan power stone he'd retrieved from GIR.

He shook his head, and flung open the annex door.

***

GIR sobbed with a stranger's voice, optics hissing dark static. "Asami, why did you eat me?"

Zim took a step backward. He knew the wall couldn't be more than a foot away, but aside from ripping GIR to pieces, he had no way to stop hundreds of angry human souls from invading his robot.

Before he could steel himself to do it for his survival, GIR sprang on him. He'd forgotten how fast his SIR unit could be. GIR slammed into Zim's chest head-first, and pinned him to the floor.

Zim wheezed for breath and squirmed under two tiny vice-grips digging his elbows into the wood. "Stand down, GIR! That's an order!" He glared at the robot lying flush against his torso, heavier than he'd ever been. "Obey your master—"

The dark static in those eyes was the only thing that moved; the rest of GIR's body was still. Zim's muscles went slack under the enormous weight of his tiny minion, and the static spread from GIR's optics, swallowing up the periphery.

Hundreds of human voices filtered in from GIR's head. They clung to his nerves like ice, and his robot's weight seemed to sink through him.

 _Snip._ Zim dragged his gaze out of the static void. A new ghost-child stood above him, a head-shaped silhouette wavering above the blood pooled in the lower fifth of her cranium.

 _Snip,_ went the rusty kitchen shears in the mostly-headless little girl's hands. She gurgled, turned the scissors downward, and stabbed them into Zim's left eye.

Unconsciousness wasn't immediate. Zim regained the use of his voice, screaming as the blades pierced the sinewy nerves connecting the optical implant to his meat-brain. The sightless ghost's aim was poor, and she gouged the flesh inside Zim's eye socket in a vain attempt to finish the job.

She stabbed again and again, mincing Zim's left eye into pink soup. It was only after the metal penetrated his brain that everything went mercifully blank.

***

Red-brown earth wavered before him. Zim blinked, but it didn't improve the view.

His skull lanced with pain; the Pak had restored enough for him to wake up. He would've preferred to slip back into oblivion until repairs completed, but something about the room bothered him.

He was somewhere humid and stinking of soil, away from the rotting planks and drywall of the school. The stench of human blood coated his skin and antennae, thick and metallic—mingled with a fear-sweat he knew well.

Zim was on his knees, bound in rusty chains from waist to shoulders. His Pak was completely obstructed, and his lower legs were chained up as well. For all his motivation to move, only his head was free.

There may as well have been chains around his neck, because looking up took monumental effort. His vision blurred, and the perspective was sickeningly off. His left optical implant hadn't healed yet—his Pak was busy fixing the more grievous injuries behind it. He struggled to make out the figure strapped to the table in front of him through the red curtain shrouding half his sight.

The bent spike of black hair poking above the table's surface was the easiest thing to spot from Zim's vantage point on the floor. "Dib?"

Boots and clothing rubbed and strained against bolted-down shackles as Dib turned his head to face Zim. Dib's eyes widened behind cracked lenses.

Dib opened his mouth. Before any words came, thick arms holding a sledgehammer rose above the table. The giant grey zombie had been there the whole time.

Zim jerked against the chains. " _No!_ " He overbalanced, and his heavy bonds brought him to the floor.

The hammer slammed into Dib's head. It splattered, a wet fruit once full of ideas, obsession, and infuriating determination. Now it was just brains—scattered across the table, clinging to the hammer's striking end, spilling on the floor in a pool of bone shards and fluid.

The groaning giant dragged the hammer off the table. Dib's lower jaw was all that remained of his head. An incisor hung from a nerve thread in a row of broken teeth.

Zim's greatest rival was gone. Something numb constricted his mind and body, making the chains redundant. He no longer felt the gore-slick dirt under his face, or the warm human blood trickling around his remaining eye.

GIR stepped into his line of sight. His optics displayed dark static, and the blood streaking his chrome had congealed into a burgundy jam.

 _Snip._ It was his turn with the scissors.

"Help me," Zim whispered, and GIR plunged the scissors into Zim's left eye socket.

Blackness came instantly. But even if the Pak restored him to consciousness again, he was trapped. He wouldn't experience the pain of death forever as a ghost, but as a regenerating torture victim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wrong End 4: Possessed GIR.


	10. 5-1: The Road To Hell

Gaz led the way back to the annex entry. As Dib followed, he noticed the way Gaz kept her head low, eyes on the floor. She couldn't have been _that_ jumpy about falling into holes, but Dib wasn't about to ask what her deal was. Gaz kept her shoulders so rigid, Dib thought spikes might pop out if he got too close, or said the wrong thing.

They exited the hall, sidled around a large hole, and were in the entryway proper.

"Called it," Gaz said.

Dib shifted a step to the right to see what his sister meant. "Zim?"

The alien lingered in the doorway opposite the one Dib and Gaz had come through, while GIR lovingly stroked the splintered wood frame. Zim glared at Dib, eyes shiny even in the dimness.

"Dib." Zim had that flat, barely-controlled tone. "Still alive, I see."

"Yeah." Dib stared at GIR; he looked like he'd used someone's corpse as a kiddie pool. "By the way, I gave your robot a little bag with a shriveled-up tongue in it. So did he lose it, or—"

Zim thrust a hand forward with an unamused expression. The tongue bag dangled by his pinched fingertips. Dib smothered the urge to point out the irony of Zim holding the item like it was a creepy bug.

"GIR claimed we need it," Zim said. "Explain."

"Okay, but how are you carrying that without getting hit with some kind of horrible ghost-vision curse?"

Dib pointed at the drawstring bag, and Zim gave it a sideways glance. "Oh, it was probably the power stone I used to clean all the whiny, screamy dead humans out of GIR's head."

GIR scraped a walleyed piggy in the floorboards with one metal finger. "It's all quiet now. I wish they'd return my calls."

"No, you don't." Zim approached Dib in several brisk steps and held it out. "I sacrificed a powerful alien artifact for this disgusting thing. You're _welcome._ " Dib took it, and Zim backed up a few steps. "Now tell me."

Dib held his breath for a moment, expecting something bad to happen. Zim fixing him with an expectant look, Gaz crossing her arms with her hands tucked into her hoodie sleeves, and GIR adding devil horns to his pig drawing all stayed the same.

"There's an escape charm," Dib said, slipping the bag gingerly into a trench coat pocket. "We're supposed to put our paper scraps together, and redo the ritual."

Zim's eyes widened. "Really? That's it?" He crammed his right hand up the cuff of his left glove, digging for something. "Then what in unholy _filth_ are we waiting for?!"

"We can't yet," Dib said, and Zim stopped. "First, we have to do the ritual different to get out, and I don't know what the difference is." He glanced at Gaz. "Second, I think we have to appease one of the ghosts."

Zim grit his teeth and clenched his fists, looking ready to launch into a conniption fit, then relaxed with, "Wait. Do you mean the wretched little murder-girl? That—Sachiko?"

Dib blinked. "Yeah. How'd you know?"

"Because I told him," Gaz said. "I figured we'd either have to deal with her or the nurse to get out. But we have her tongue now, so..."

"Yeah, that makes sense. Now we just have to find the body, which I _think_ is in the basement." Dib eyed the dark lines between the floorboards. "If there even is one, because I haven't found a way down yet."

"If you're implying that we have to go back and search every inch of this school..." Zim's voice was a restrained growl, but his antennae were pressed flat against his skull. He trailed off without coming up with a threat.

Then Dib remembered. "Oh, right." He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out the tiny key. "I got this from that suicide-looping principal. I bet it goes to his office." He looked from Zim to Gaz. "Either of you come across a locked door?"

Gaz shook her head. "Just lots of fake ones."

Zim kept quiet, glaring at the giant robot GIR's piggy drawing now included. Then his antennae twitched up like raised eyebrows.

"There was one," Zim said. "It rattled, but it wouldn't open."

Dib stowed the key back in his pocket. "Where is it?"

Zim hoisted GIR up by the robot's non-bloody hand, just as he finished drawing a girl pig with sexy legs on the shoulder of his demon-horned piggy's death mech. "Upstairs. Follow Zim to victory!"

Zim hurried through the doorway he and GIR had come out of, and Gaz followed suit. Dib brought up the rear, patting his pockets to make sure the necessary items were in place.

Dib watched Zim as he led them to the dark stairwell. The alien kept a tight hold on his robot's hand.

-

The key, which looked like it belonged to a diary instead of a door, fit perfectly and unlocked the principal's office. The instant it opened, GIR yanked out of Zim's grasp to rush into the room.

"Hey!" Zim dashed into the office after him, and stopped dead three steps from the doorway. He hugged his spindly arms, hissing in his breath, and backed up, hunching into himself.

Dib stayed just behind the threshold. "What? What is it?" Zim didn't respond. He retreated another step, bumped into Dib, and spun to face him, eyes wide.

Dib peered into the room; GIR had attached himself mouth-first to one of the armchairs set out for visitors. He looked down at Zim. "What is _wrong_ with you?"

"You don't hear it?" Zim's voice was thready. Dib nudged him aside and stepped into the room.

_It's her fault._

Dib froze. It was the voice from the tongue vision.

_I didn't mean for it to happen. She overreacted! I didn't intend to..._

Gaz shouldered past him, and Dib sucked in a deep breath—he didn't realize he'd been holding it. He shook his head and looked around, hair prickling from the office's supernatural chill. Charms littered the walls, particularly on one side of the room.

_It's her fault. I didn't mean for it to happen._

Principal Yanagihori's disembodied voice continued muttering from all directions. Gaz clenched and unclenched her hands throughout every excuse. Giving his sister a slight berth, Dib headed for the desk at the front of the room.

_She overreacted!_

Small booted footsteps tapped across the floor behind Dib as Zim braved the room's concentrated entitlement to stay close to his robot. GIR made cartoony chewing noises on the armchair upholstery.

_I didn't intend..._

Dib found a hole in the wall behind the desk, square and big enough to crawl through. Horizontal scrapes marred the floor in front of it, stopping at one cabinet standing flush with another.

He got on his knees, took a bracing breath, and felt into the hole. His fingers brushed cold metal, and he jerked away. When nothing jumped up to rip his arm off, he reached down again. It was the top rung of a ladder.

Dib straightened up and turned to the others. "I found the way down."

Gaz looked up from the floor. She blinked several times, as if coming out of a trance, and came forward.

Dib carefully lowered himself into the hole, finding a foothold a few rungs down. He went down, then stopped when his chin was level with the office floor. He had a clear view of Zim trying to tear his robot off the armchair.

"We're leaving!" Dib called out, and ducked below the hole.

" _No!_ "

Frantic scuffling and fabric ripping came from the office above as Dib descended.

The underground tunnel system was better lit than the school above. The electricity somehow still functioned, even if the hanging bulbs contrasted with the rock walls and uneven wood supports.

Dib stepped off the ladder, warm humidity replacing the cold from the principal's office. The tunnels were unmarked as far as he could see, but he caught a faint stench of something from further in.

Gaz descended next, followed by Zim, who skipped the ladder in favor of spidering down on his Pak legs in two seconds. He grimaced and made shooing motions at GIR, who was clinging to the back of his head. The robot jumped to the floor, and Zim hastily brushed away the dried blood that had flaked off GIR's body.

As Dib led the group further in, the insulating nature of the tunnels produced a new kind of oppressiveness the school above didn't have. The creaking wood, crinkling glass, and papers shifting on the wall were all behind them, leaving only footsteps muffled by solid earth. Dib wasn't claustrophobic when he stepped off the ladder, but the narrow halls, low ceiling, and Zim staying less than a foot behind made him feel like a textbook case.

Playful laughter encircled them, and Dib stopped. Zim screamed, bumped into Dib from behind, and screamed again.

Dib spun around. "Would you stop that?!"

Zim clutched GIR to his chest, heedless of the sticky red dye job. "It's her! She found us!"

Another girlish giggle echoed off the walls. Dib sighed, faced forward, and continued walking. "She's _buried_ here, Zim. Of course she's going to have more of a presence. Just deal with it."

Zim made a small noise in the back of his throat. Dib didn't hear GIR's feet return to the floor.

After a few turns, the tunnel opened up into a room. Shelves lined with human heads of varying freshness broke up the subterranean monotony.

"An underground mausoleum," Dib muttered, locking his gaze on the floor. "Great."

He hurried past the shelves, empty eyes and sockets alike staring from his peripheral vision. He didn't count how many shelf rows there were—only that they were all full, and that meant too many.

Someone was breathing heavy when they exited the head room, but Sachiko's laughter echoed from behind, and Dib didn't want to stop to check. He figured it was him, anyway.

-

A dead end loomed ahead, with a doorway to the right as the sole option. The faint smell from the start of the tunnel was now strong enough that Dib had started taking shallower breaths.

"I'm not going in there." Zim's voice came from several feet away, and Dib turned to see him standing close to the wall. GIR was by his side, picking at the rocks. "And neither will you, if you haven't completely lost your idiot Earth-mind."

Dib huffed. "I'm not excited about the return of rotten meat potpourri either, but Sachiko's body could be in here."

He went for the doorway again, and Zim screeched, " _Listen_ to me, you stupid—"

A huge grey figure materialized from the darkness beyond the doorway. Dib registered the red eyes, oil-slick tearstains, and raised sledgehammer an instant before it fell.

Someone rammed Dib into the wall beside the doorway, and the hammer struck stone. It must have been Gaz, Dib figured, because Zim was already Pak-spidering away in a shiny metal blur with GIR in tow.

Dib shoved himself away from the wall and staggered into a full sprint. The nondescript walls blended together, until another doorway came into view. He grabbed the side and swung himself into the room.

He stood inside it for a few seconds, heartbeat too loud in his ears to listen for thundering footsteps and guttural roars. The room smelled wet and terrible, which made catching his breath excruciating.

His mind flashed images of the grey zombie filling the doorway, and Dib stumbled forward in the poorly lit room. He tripped on something, which gave under his foot with a meaty squelch as he fell face-first into a stinking pool.

Dib yanked his face out of the shallow water, coughing and spitting out the coppery coating inside his mouth. The pool lapped around his elbows as he pushed himself up. Even with the bad lighting, its color was off.

Something bobbed in the disturbed liquid, and bumped into his arm. Dib looked at it, straight into the eyeless sockets of a teenage schoolgirl.

Dib stopped breathing. Eyeballs—too many to just be hers—floated in the reeking human stew, along with hanks of hair, globs of flesh, and bodies in every stage of decomposition. That water had been in his _mouth_.

He almost fell beneath the surface again in his haste to get out of the corpse pool, and collapsed on his hands and knees to vomit on the ground. The image of those dark eye sockets burned a hole in his mind as reddish-brown blood-water dripped down the inside of his glasses.

Dib rose on shaky legs and lurched for the doorway. It wasn't until he was out in the tunnel lighting that he remembered why he'd entered that room in the first place. He whipped his gaze up and down the corridor, listening hard.

All he heard was a low, pulsing hum from deep inside his head. It had started after he entered the annex, and now more pain came with each pulse.

It felt like a countdown.

***

As Gaz fled, she didn't notice Dib had gone in a different direction. She also didn't notice the tunnels going dark around her.

A form of consciousness returned in sluggish flickers, a drugged haze. She was shuffling down a narrow corridor with jerky, uncoordinated movements.

Twin cyan circles shined out of the gloom. They belonged to some idiot robot, just standing there, staring at her. Gaz reached for them, and the lights shrank into the infinite distance.

Gaz slid her eyes away from the far-off robot, dream-like, to observe her outstretched hand. It was pitch black.


	11. 5-2: A Flash of Light

"GIR! Stop running off like that!" Zim came spidering in from up the tunnel. He dropped to his feet as he got closer, and sidestepped his robot to approach Gaz. "Where'd the Dib go?"

"Gazzy. Gaaazzy." GIR waved his little arms and jumped around Gaz in a half-circle. "Time for school!" Gaz stared at the floor, limp hair framing her downcast face. GIR stopped dancing, cocked his head up at Gaz, then turned to Zim. "She lookin' funny."

Zim shook his head. "She's human, GIR. They can't help it."

Gaz hadn't reacted at all—not to aspersions on her species, GIR's idiocy, or Zim's earlier question.

"Are you listening? _Where is Dib?!_ " Talking louder only made his voice bounce off the rough stone walls. He sucked in his breath, looked over his shoulder to make sure nothing unpleasant was about to come running, and whispered, "Don't we need him for that escape plan?"

His antennae perked on their own, and he faced forward. Gaz was hissing—no, it was the inky mist leaking from her mouth.

She lifted her head. A black substance swirled behind her rolled-back eyes.

***

Dib trudged through a small room with a clothed skeleton hanging from a noose. He didn't bother to investigate; the back of his head felt like an open wound.

A small girl blocked the doorway ahead—grey-skinned, stringy-haired, and wearing a torn red dress.

"Get out." She grated out the words with more hate than any living seven-year-old could have accumulated in their short lifetime. Dib took a step closer, and the girl's voice pitched up to a screech. " _Go away!_ "

Dib, pickled in rotten meat juices, set his jaw. "You first."

Limbs stiffening with oncoming ghost-paralysis, he reached into his pocket and flung the bloody drawstring bag at the girl. Her eyes widened around black irises and she shrieked, throwing her hands up like a classmate had thrown a frog at her.

Dib stumbled from the momentum of his throw, the paralysis suddenly gone. The girl was nowhere to be seen.

He picked up the tongue bag, and stepped through the doorway.

***

Every visible inch of Gaz's skin—face, neck, and fingers—swirled with black mist. It wasn't so much over the skin as it was replacing it.

The longer Zim watched, the more he became aware of a low hum coming from somewhere—the ground, the walls, maybe the air itself. It had been there since he woke up in that first classroom, an ominous but ignorable undercurrent.

Gaz lolled her neck back at an uncomfortable angle, and the low hum sunk into Zim's skeleton.

GIR reached up to tug on Gaz's hoodie, and Zim practically pounced on him to pull him away. "Come on, we're leaving this school." He fixed Gaz with a fierce look. "You _will_ come with us."

"I finally found it." Oily darkness curled from Gaz's mouth as she droned. "A nightmare world from which there is no awakening."

Gaz smiled. She wasn't a smiler, but that wasn't the worst part. It was her eyes. They were completely black.

Zim backpedaled, dragging GIR with him. "You can't keep me here! I have to return and subjugate your pathetic species!" He pointed at her. "You have _no_ authority over me!"

His pointer-arm trembled as Gaz took ragged breaths and shuffled closer. Zim mentally throttled his panicking brains, and an idea tumbled out. "Wait! If you stay, and you make _me_ stay, then who will punish Dib?"

Gaz stopped shuffling, already looming over Zim. He started breathing quicker as he searched for the next few words.

"If we stay here, Dib will go home without you. He'll consume all your pizza. He'll play with your vampire—pig—things. And it'll be terrible!"

Gaz swayed in place. "He erased my file."

Zim's antennae twitched. "Eh? Oh, that was probably from the electronic wave disruptor I was experimenting with last night." He chuckled, half from nerves. "And your precious gaming device fell before its superior technological might!"

"So _you_ did it." Gaz's voice was clear. No smoky mist came out this time.

Zim looked her over again. The strange black skin-contamination was gone, as was the low hum.

She was glaring at him. He tensed to jump away, but Gaz was faster.

"Two hundred and _fifty-nine hours!_ "

***

Dib knew this room. The shovel, the mound, even the dirty scissors were all the same. The pressure was crushing by now, and a warm trickle of blood leaked out his nose. He wiped it away with a dirty trench coat sleeve and stepped further in.

The mound of dirt at the back of the room had a rough hole dug in it, as if with bare hands. The top half of a child's skeleton, dressed in bloodied yellow rags, was visible.

The pressure intensified for an instant as the little girl appeared in a pulse of negative energy, floating above the exposed skeleton. Sachiko had come to guard her grave.

"I'll kill you," she rasped like a first-grader trying to imitate a noir protagonist.

Icy breath wrapped around Dib's neck with strangling fingers. He took a long step forward to yank himself free, but the air was molasses. As it solidified around him, sweeping up his legs and torso, he held the tongue bag straight out in front of him. Unable to move his legs, he bent the top half of his body to strain his arm closer.

He had the bag a hairsbreadth from Sachiko when she distorted. One eye vanished into a bloody socket, and her hair shortened to pigtails.

Then she was gone. The tongue bag slipped from Dib's numb, shaking fingers, landing on the child skeleton. He sank to his knees as the petrifying air and intense pressure lifted.

Dib let out a long breath. "Finally." He looked down at the deceased girl, buried below the school she was murdered in as a cover-up. Despite protesting muscles, he scooped the displaced dirt back into the hole, packed it down, and smoothed it out.

He wondered if the inability to move on from Heavenly Host applied to Sachiko, too.

Dib carefully stood, and when his legs didn't immediately buckle, turned and headed for the doorway.

Sachiko flew out of the small adjoining room in a screaming blue frenzy.

"Oh come on!" Dib held up his arms and tried to lean away from Sachiko's clawing fingers. She was still in pigtails for some reason. "I gave it back to you! Isn't that good enough?!"

Sachiko kept wailing, but no scratches came. Dib lowered his arms; Sachiko was being restrained by the little boy ghost from the first building entryway, and a smaller, mostly-headless girl spirit.

While Dib gaped, Gaz showed up carrying GIR and Zim under her arms, and dumped them to the floor. Zim got up and rubbed his visibly punched eye, looking guilty as hell. Dib had no context for this, but it failed to dampen the schadenfreude.

"Yuki!" The boy ghost could speak. "Yuki, please!"

Sachiko's thrashing weakened, and the underground tunnels shook in a low rumble. The little boy fixed Dib with a stare—not a soul-destroying, empty-eyed gaze, but something resembling reason. Something imploring.

"Guys, come on," Dib said, reaching into his pants pocket. "It's time to do this."

Zim pulled a tiny paper square from inside one of his gloves and unfolded it, while Gaz produced a scrap from her hoodie pocket. Dib took out his scrap, and stepped closer to them.

He held out the creased paper arm. "Okay. First, we put our scraps together."

Zim and Gaz held up their portions to complete the torn effigy, while GIR watched from below.

"Then what?" said Zim.

Dib stared at the lined-up tears in the paper doll. "I dunno. We're supposed to say the charm again, but it has to be different this time, and I don't—"

Gaz interrupted with a disgusted noise. "You _seriously_ can't figure it out?"

"You're supposed to say it once for each person included. That's what the blog said."

"It's called 'Sachiko Ever After,' right?" Gaz looked him in the eye. "Maybe she wants to spread everyone's guts all over the walls because people keep leaving her out."

Corpses scattered around like dirty laundry suddenly made perfect sense. Google Translate hadn't foiled him at all. He'd followed the directions to a tee, just like everyone else. The blog post was either a mistake, or an intentional trap, and he'd fallen for it. Just like everyone else.

The quaking worsened, and the shovel propped up against the wall clanged to the floor.

"Come _on,_ Dib!" Gaz's fingernails nearly pinched through her paper head-scrap.

Dib shook his head and took a deep breath, ignoring the small rocks falling loose from the ceiling, and Sachiko's thin cries. "Sachiko, we beg of you..."

Gaz repeated the charm, then Zim, coming back to Dib at the start of their tiny circle. He said it one more time to make four, then shut his eyes tight.

The flash went straight through his eyelids, and the remaining dark energy was sucked out of the room in a roar.

Dib opened his eyes. Sachiko's wailing had stopped, as had the earthquake, and she stood with the other two child spirits. Her missing eye and pigtails remained.

"You've temporarily weakened the barrier between the school and the living world." Sachiko sounded slightly older than before. "But you have to get outside before you can leave. The gateway won't be open for long."

Dib thought he'd never feel that happy again. Zim rushed ahead on his Pak legs with GIR in his arms, so Dib and Gaz ran to keep up.

They ascended from the tunnels into the school proper, and the halls became a blur. As thick dread started to clog the newfound clarity of the air, Dib lengthened his strides. Heavenly Host itself was closing back in on them.

The building shook again as the group raced through the annex. They kept moving, until a teacher's desk fell through the floor above, right on top of Zim.

Dib scrambled to a halt. "Crap! Not _now!_ "

Zim pulled himself free with a series of metallic snaps; only his Pak legs had been caught. He stood as what was left of them retracted, picked up GIR, and kept running.

GIR laughed maniacally at the free ride down the long staircase and through the halls. His laughter gradually came from farther away—without the use of his Pak legs, Zim was lagging behind. Gaz turned around, scooped him under one arm, and kept running. Zim tucked his legs in and held GIR close to his chest.

Dib flung the sliding door open and lunged into the outdoor walkway. He stood aside while Gaz ran through carrying Zim and GIR, then slammed it shut, breathing hard. He knew it wasn't just the rainy humidity making the air thicker now.

Zim's boots hit the walkway as Gaz dropped him. "We're outside! But where are we supposed to escape to?" he said, glancing around frantically.

Dib rushed across the walkway to find whatever gateway Sachiko (or her facsimile) had been talking about, and almost walked into her.

Sachiko, standing in the middle of the walkway, giggled and grinned far too wide as Dib shrieked and jumped backwards. "And where do you think _you're_ going?"

"Jeez! Seriously?!" Dib pointed sharply at the little girl. "Weren't you somebody else like five minutes ago?!"

Sachiko vanished, and Dib heard an unmistakable screech and a clang. He turned to find Sachiko standing in front of the annex door, and Zim scrambling away from her into the railing, GIR face-down where he'd been dropped.

"Do it again!" GIR cheered into the rotten wood.

The door to the main building slammed open from behind. Dib risked a glance over his shoulder, but the giant zombie was already roaring and stomping at them, sledgehammer and all.

Dib whipped his gaze from one undead being to the other. Caught between a murderghost and Zombie Hammerman, their chances of escaping plummeted straight to zero.

A red and green blur leapt past Dib. Zim landed in a crouch and threw GIR into Hammerman's path.

"GIR!" Zim pointed at the hulking zombie. " _Defensive mode!_ "

The little robot's cyan lights flashed to red, and he got a running start at his designated target.

Sachiko reappeared right next to GIR in a flash Dib felt more than saw. He stopped inches from the zombie and dropped to the walkway in convulsions, optics flickering intermittent dark static.

The zombie raised his sledgehammer. Zim shoved his possessed robot aside and jumped on Zombie Hammerman like a snarling face-hugger. The man bellowed, hammer slipping from his large hands as he tried to grab Zim from behind.

A splintering crack distracted Dib from the loud weird alien noises, and he spun around—Gaz had kicked in the weakest part of the railing with her goth boots. She extended a hand to Dib.

Hammerman was down on one knee, reaching for his sledgehammer. The instant the hammer left the floor, Dib grabbed Zim by the torso and yanked him off the zombie's face, Zim's claws leaving six livid black lines. Hammerman swung his weapon where Zim had just been, smashing his face in with a wet crunch. The sledgehammer thumped to the ground as its owner staggered back, clutching his face with a muffled roar.

Zim got heavier, and Dib glanced down—GIR had attached himself to Zim's ankle. Holding Zim by one skinny arm, Dib turned and took Gaz's hand.

"Who said you could leave?!" Sachiko screamed from behind them. Dib kept his eyes on the endless forest as Gaz stepped off the walkway. "Who do you think you are?!"

Dib's legs locked up, but Gaz pulled everyone with her.

***

The rusty yellow smudge above came into focus. It was the middle school cafeteria ceiling, disgusting and undamaged as ever.

Gaz blinked and sat up from the floor, next to the lunch table Zim always watched Dib from. Those two were sprawled across the table, and a clang came from the other side as GIR rolled off the bench. Orange sunlight angled through the cafeteria windows; detention was probably over, and no one else was around. The floor and walls around the lunch table were intact, like a hell portal hadn't shredded them apart hours ago.

Gaz stood and brushed herself off as Dib and Zim sat up and reoriented themselves. She knew exactly what they were going to say next.

"We're back?" Dib readjusted his crooked glasses. "It's over?"

Zim fixed the wall with a blank stare. "Just the stink of live humans. We escaped the death school." He rounded on Dib. "Except you. What did you do, swim in a pool of corpses?"

Dib went to rub his face with his hands, then thought better of it. "Something like that."

GIR, still blood-streaked, jumped up right next to Zim. "I played in one!"

Zim scrabbled to the other end of the table. "Get away from me! You're _still_ disgusting! I—" He looked down at himself, and squawked in revulsion at the red-brown robot stain on his shirt front.

Gaz snorted as Zim swiped at his uniform with equally filthy gloves. Then she glared at her brother, who was biting his lip and grinning. "If you ever do something stupid like that again, Dib—"

Dib held up his hands. "Okay! I'm sorry! Didn't I already say I was?" He slid off the lunch table to stand beside it. "Or is this still about your game? Still not my fault, y'know."

Gaz rolled her eyes. Typical Dib.

Zim stood on the table, gaining negligible height on Dib, and pointed at him. "Don't you _ever_ attempt to trap me in a screaming death-dimension again, puke-worm! Or I'll..." His antennae lowered an inch. "I'll... you know. Make you suffer."

He turned to GIR, who was licking one of his metal hands like a lollipop. "GIR! Take us home. And don't slow down on the way, we don't want a bunch of human _randos_ seeing us out of our disguises." GIR popped his hand out of his mouth in an arc of saliva to salute, then got into hovering position.

"Hey," Dib said. Zim jerked his head up from where he was getting settled on his robot's shoulders with an annoyed look. "Come to school tomorrow."

Zim squinted an eye. "What if I don't feel like taking orders from a _human?_ "

"Because—" Dib huffed. "I just want tomorrow to be _normal,_ okay? Relatively, at least."

"What if I stay home?"

"Then I'll break into your base and drag you out here myself. Like I was born to do."

Zim grunted and scowled at the top of GIR's head. "Fine." He gave GIR a little kick with his heel, and they rocketed off.

Gaz eyed her brother. "What was _that_ all about?"

Dib shook his head and sighed. "I'm gonna go home, take a shower, _sleep,_ and forget this happened."

***

Zim was at his desk the next morning when Dib walked into class. The alien didn't appear even remotely smug about it. He had a fresh disguise on, but it didn't hide the faint shadows around his eyes. Dib knew he didn't look much better himself—bathroom mirrors still made him jumpy.

Dib walked across the room, went one row down, and sank into his seat. Nothing had been gained from yesterday's events. Nothing was lost, either, except maybe ten years of his lifespan.

More students filtered in, and the bell rang. Chairs creaked and chatter quieted down as the teacher called roll.

Dib shifted around to look behind him. Zita's desk was empty. He faced the blackboard again and clenched his fists in his lap.

Roll call ended. The teacher never called Zita's name.

A knot formed in Dib's gut, and he raised his hand. "You forgot Zita."

The teacher stared at Dib. "We don't have a Zita in this class."

Dib had a protest ready, and dropped it. Roll call was kind of short that day. He scanned the room—several other desks were also empty.

The teacher turned and started writing assignments on the blackboard. Zim was glancing around the class too, and some of the remaining students gave them weird looks.

Dib caught Zim's wide-eyed expression, and he knew. They were the only ones who noticed. To everyone else, those seats had always been vacant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end.


End file.
